


Not Bad, For The End Of The World

by the_autumn_soldier



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: A LOT of Angst, Bunker Society, Death, Futuristic Societies, Homophobia, Loss, M/M, Male Homosexuality, Science Fiction, apocalypse au, graphic smut, past trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-19
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-05-25 11:55:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 25,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14976662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_autumn_soldier/pseuds/the_autumn_soldier
Summary: In the year 2135 procreation is more important than ever, as humanity is slowly dying out. People have gone back to practical beliefs. Homosexuality is seen as counterproductive and hence homophobia is widely set in the heads of the people once again.Bucky Barnes barely survives escaping his old life and ends up in one of the many bunkers, people have built to stay alive. He meets Steve Rogers, the man who saves him and they fall for each other, unhappily and without ever being able to show it.A story about a romance in a time where romance is almost extinct.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> CONTENT WARNINGS: Death, Mentions of suicide

The world had changed. James Buchanan Barnes, called Bucky, was hit by that realization very suddenly and forcefully as he stood outside his old family home and looked at it for the last time. The window of his old room was broken, there was a piece of newspaper taped there, but that had also mostly fallen off. The door had fallen halfway out of the hinges, because Bucky had punched it. It had made no sense to take care of the house much and also there had been no money to do that. The paint was coming off everywhere. The name sign next to the doorbell merely spelled B-rne- now. Every other letter had been worn down. Bucky looked at it and felt the emotions of almost 30 years flushing over him, all connected to this house, this lonely house on an empty street, not far from the next village. But that had been abandoned some time ago. Bucky had been one of the last people, all the others had moved to this or that bunker in the perimeter. Now he would too.

His last days in the house he had spent alone. His parents had lived with him in the house before, but after the last rain, that had contained a lot more acid and radiation than usual, they had withered away and died after only three days. The only reason Bucky was still alive was probably that he had been inside when the rain had started. Stupid Mom and Dad, he thought. He had buried them in the backyard, after having spent hours digging up holes deep enough, so that they wouldn’t be swept away by the next rain, all the while shaking with sobs, his tears mixing with the sweat running down his face. Now, other than the little bumps on the ground, there was nothing implying that there were two people buried there. People had gotten a lot less sentimental.

For long Bucky had tried to convince his parents to find one of the bunkers, probably the only safe places nowadays, but they didn’t want to. Now they were dead. Just because they had been stubborn. Bucky kicked a nearby rock, out of pure frustration and let out a small cry of agony, which only made him more angry.

The last days he had spent mostly packing up and staring at the ceiling. The day he had buried his parents he had screamed into the open field, spilled more tears than he ever had before. The second day he took his living room apart, ripped every family photo off the walls and smashed them on the ground. Now he regretted it, because he had nothing to remember his parents by. The third day he had been laying on the floor, staring at the ceiling. For hours and hours. The fourth day he packed his bags for good and decided to finally leave.

There he was standing now, in front of the house he had grown up in and realized that the world had changed. He wondered, why he only realized now. The world had always been an unfriendly place, at least ever since Bucky was born 30 years ago, he had never known a world in which polar bears existed, tigers, great white sharks. They were all just stories to him. Pictures in history books. But still, it had gotten worse and worse over the past years and only now that Bucky was about to leave his whole life behind, because it was simply too dangerous, he realized and it almost killed him. For a moment he sank down on his knees and buried his face in his hands, crying again, alone in the dirty soil. He stood up, pressed a kiss onto the palm of his hand and touched the walls of the house one last time, before he turned to the empty, dusty road and started walking.

He had seen the forecast. Despite all the natural disasters somehow Internet and TV was still up and working. Priorities were in all the wrong places. It wasn’t supposed to rain for another couple days and Bucky hoped eagerly that the forecast was right, otherwise there would be a high chance of him dying because of the acidic rain. He vaguely knew where the nearest bunker was, not even half an hour away. Walking was the only option he had, their car had broken down a few weeks ago and there had been no one in the village left to fix it. Food had always been a sparse resource, plants poorly grown in the backyard. Not a lot of variety, but enough to survive. At school they sometimes gave out food for the kids and their families for free, but that was long ago now as well. Now the school was an empty shell, withering like Bucky’s own house. He had visited a day before the rain fell. For no reason. Maybe he was sentimental after all. Bucky had never liked school, but seeing the empty building amongst all the other empty buildings, dead skeletons robbed of the life that was in them once, was worse. So much worse.

Walking away, Bucky decided not to look back. He turned his head forward and looked at the road knowing where to go. For the first time in a very long time he felt something like hope, sparking at the very depths of his heart, buried beneath sorrow and the pain and the grief of the last few days and weeks. He couldn’t stay in that house. He felt bad for leaving his parents behind, but then on the other hand they were dead now and wouldn’t have wanted for Bucky to stay and potentially kill himself. He had gotten close. Very close. But nowadays it was hard to stay alive and he didn’t want to throw everything away just like that. Bucky had gotten comfortably numb instead. People in today’s society were used to loved ones dying, it was something you needed to be prepared for. And Bucky hadn’t known, but, subconsciously, he had been preparing for a very long time. That didn’t mean it hurt any less, it didn’t mean he didn’t still feel like dying, but it made it easier to move on and walk away. He had seen it coming. He didn’t blame himself, he blamed his parents for wanting to stay out of pure stubbornness. He was angry at them and felt bad for it. But at the same time he wished he could’ve hugged them one last time. He shook his head and pushed these thoughts away as well as he could, he couldn’t bring them back. No one could. Technology hadn’t gone that far yet and maybe that was a good thing.

There were clouds in the sky which wasn’t a bad thing because the radiation from the sun had gotten stronger as well, so going out into the bright sun often resulted in quick and awful sunburns if you weren’t protected. It was warm though and Bucky took off his jacket and stuffed it into his backpack.

He walked for longer than he had expected. Or maybe it just felt like long. He encountered very little vegetation, a few tiny lizards, but no humans. None at all. Not a hundred years ago they had been concerned about overpopulation, but now humans were closer to extinction than ever. Planet earth was simply not built to be inhabited by humans anymore. They had destroyed it. Now it destroyed them. This really is the apocalypse, he thought and chuckled, amazed at his own dark humour.

 His feet felt heavy quickly and his head got dizzy, yet Bucky was determined to stay focused and walk straight, always straight ahead. He was sweating more than usual and started feeling nauseous. He pulled his waterbottle from his backpack and drank almost three quarters of its contents.

For a moment his vision got clearer and he was able to walk straight again. He wouldn’t let a stupid thing like dehydration stop him from getting to where he wanted to go. But he started to feel like dehydration wasn’t the problem here as the dizziness didn’t go away, neither did the nausea and his vision got shaky again and he had to squint his eyes to see properly.

Now he started to wonder if he was still going in the right direction. He couldn’t properly remember the last few minutes and had no idea if he had drifted off, walked in another direction, maybe even walked backwards. He started to panic, looked around desperate to find something that could tell him the way. But he was lost. Terribly lost. “Fuck” he said quietly. “Fuck!” he yelled, louder this time.

Afraid of losing his way even more he sank down on the ground, defeated, and started crying. He screamed. All of his anger went into the air. Why, oh why, had he been so damn stupid and thought he could find this bunker with that little direction in this unfriendly climate. Who even knew how radiating this environment was? He had run away from home as a way to survive and now he would die alone, not remembered by anyone, out in the wild somewhere, surrounded by nothing. He would die and rot and he would become one with the dirty soil. Dust. The imagination turned his stomach upside down and he retched, but his empty stomach didn’t give him anything to puke out. He sank down, face first into the soil, his sobs shaking his body every now and then. Eventually he went calm and quiet. It was fine. Everybody died at a young age these days. It was fine. It was fine. It was fine.

 

***

“Steve!” someone shouted close to Bucky’s ear. Who the hell was Steve? What the hell happened? Was he dead? Bucky tried to move, but found that it was too exhausting. He was still laying face down on the ground. “Get over here, I found someone, I think he’s still alive” the voice shouted again. So he wasn’t dead. That was some good news at least. He heard footsteps approaching. Steve, he assumed. A hand grabbed him and turned him over on his back. Bucky knew that if he opened his eyes the sand would get in, so he didn’t, his eyes felt too heavy to open them anyways. “Holy shit” the man, whose name apparently was Steve said, more to himself than the other person, Bucky assumed. “We taking him in?” the other man asked.

“What the fuck did you think we would do, Tony? Leave him out here to die? Think for a moment before you speak, will ya?” Steve said, audibly annoyed, and a moment later Bucky felt his body being picked up and starting to move. “Alright, yeah, sorry. What a stupid question” the other man, Tony, replied, a hint of sarcasm in his voice that Steve either didn’t notice or decided not to comment on. The banter almost seemed comedic and strange as Bucky hadn’t talked to anyone in several days. Bucky assumed that the man called Steve was carrying him. He could feel his heart beating, he could hear him breathing, he could feel the stiff fabric of his jacket on his naked arm. Were they from a bunker? Would he be safe after all? Bucky had not much time to think about these things as the soft rocking that came from the walking made him drift off again and he didn’t wake up for quite a while.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTENT WARNINGS: Hospitals, Mentions of Death

The first thing Bucky noticed when he woke up was the surprisingly soft pillow under his head. At home his pillow had been worn down, so had been his mattress, which meant he’d always slept on a rather hard surface. The pillow he was laying on top of now was maybe not the softest pillow in the world, but definitely softer than what he was used to.

He tried to figure out how long he had been sleeping exactly, but there was no way of telling. He didn’t even know where he was. He opened his eyes to discover a very sterile looking room, almost like a hospital. He was seemingly laying on a bed in the middle of the room. A monitor was beeping steadily next to him, indicating his heart rate, he assumed. There were also a couple other monitors of which Bucky couldn’t figure out the purpose. The rest of the room was kept very simple. There was a chair at a small table. On the wall there were a couple of photographs that seemed old. Deep forests, blue seas. Images no one really got to see in real life anymore. The pictures seemed lonely on the otherwise empty wall. Bucky stared at the ceiling, too tired to move his limbs.

His normal reaction in a situation like this would’ve been to run, especially seeing that there was no one in the room with him, just the beeping monitor. But something kept him from it. First, he assumed that he was in no physical condition to get very far second, he didn’t know where to run and third, he assumed that where ever he was now was the safest place for him at the moment.

He remembered the two men who’d discovered him outside after he had collapsed. Tony and Steve. He wondered if they were anywhere near. He wondered if there were other people in the bunker as well. He was desperate for some human contact.

Bucky figured that he was maybe not able to run very far, but he could at least go and explore the bunker a little bit, maybe he’d even meet someone. Who knew how big this thing was. He removed the little clip on his fingertip that was connected to the beeping monitor and let it dangle off the bed. He slipped down on his naked feet and walked a few steps through the room to make sure he was capable of it.

Out of the little room he had woken up in he stepped out into a dimly lit hallway, that seemed to lead to another, bigger hallway at the end of it. There were a few doors on the opposite wall of where Bucky was standing. Two of them were closed, but one door was slightly opened and the muffled sounds of what seemed to be a football game could be heard.

Bucky walked up to that door slowly, not knowing if he should knock or just push the door open. He decided on the latter. After all it could be that someone had just left the TV on and that the room was empty. He pressed the tips of his fingers against the door and pushed it carefully, in an effort not to make too much noise. To his surprise, there was a man, facing with his back to the door, eyeing the TV, on which the game was playing, concentratedly. His feet were laying on the small table in front of him and he was holding, what seemed to be a beer bottle. His hair was blond and short, groomed with care, other than Bucky’s which was long, greasy and unkempt.

“Football is still a thing?” he asked into the thin air, more asking himself and not even fully aware of the fact that the other man could hear him. Said man turned around to look at Bucky, not seeming too startled. Maybe he had expected him to wake up. The man smiled.

“No” he said and pressed the pause button on the remote control that was next to him. The picture froze “This is a recording. Quite an old one too. 2050. I enjoy reminiscing sometimes. Although I wasn’t even alive then” He stood up and walked over to Bucky offering him his hand. For one moment Bucky was perplexed. What was he supposed to do with that hand? It took him a few seconds then he remembered. Shaking hands. It was a custom. Of course. He shook the other man’s hand. “Sorry” he said and avoided looking at the man, who looked so much tidier than him. He felt dirty in his presence. “I just haven’t had proper human contact in a couple of weeks” The other man smiled again and squeezed Bucky’s shoulder “It’s ok, you don’t have to apologize” he said “My name is Steve Rogers.” He turned around to face the TV again and pressed another button on the remote control, which made the screen go black. Then he turned back to Bucky “You’ve been asleep for quite a while. 5 days. We already thought you wouldn’t wake up at all”

Bucky looked at him. Steve. The man who had carried him here. One of the men who found him. He recognized his voice now. “Bucky” Bucky replied “…Barnes” he added, “where am I?” Steve chuckled “Upstate New York. Bunker 23-NY. Not far from home, I assume” he explained.

He was right. It wasn’t far from home. If what Bucky had left behind could still be described as a home. Whatever it was, it felt further away than it physically probably was. “No” Bucky said and looked at Steve, who was carefully watching him, as if he was afraid Bucky might lash out or something. “Thank you for saving me” Bucky said “I thought I could find the bunker by myself, but I guess I was wrong” He chuckled darkly “I would’ve probably died out there” Steve nodded and started walking through the room slowly, making a hand gesture to indicate that Bucky could sit down on his chair. An offering Bucky gladly accepted as his limbs still felt heavy. “You walked through a pretty heavily radiating field.” Steve began to explain “At least that’s where we found you. It’s remarkable that you even are alive right now.” “Am I still contaminated?” Bucky asked. “No” Steve said and shook his head “No, Bruce developed a technique to kill radiating cells in the body. Don’t ask me how it works, I never question anything Bruce does as long as it’s effective. But not many more times than once so pay attention that you don’t expose yourself to too much radiation in the future” Bucky nodded. “Who’s Bruce?” he asked. “Bruce Banner is our chief scientist. You’ll meet him tomorrow most probably, during the meeting.” “How many more are there?” Bucky asked, feeling stupid for having to ask that many questions. “Counting you in, we’re 10. Me, Tony, Bruce, Nat, Scott, Pepper, Sam, Wanda and Mr. Pierce. Mr. Pierce kind of runs the whole joint.” Bucky nodded again, trying to process all the information. Steve took his arm and guided him out of the room. “I’ll show you where you’ll sleep. I assume, you don’t want to stay in that hospital bed, eh?” Steve said and started walking down the hallway, towards the turn where it turned bigger. “No, I guess not” Bucky said quietly as Steve dragged him further. “By the way…” Steve asked “Is that your real name? Bucky?” Bucky chuckled, probably the first time he had ever laughed in a month.

It felt good. Steve’s presence made him feel good, he didn’t want to be left alone again. “No” he said “my full name is James Buchanan Barnes. I’ve always been called Bucky though, so I wouldn’t mind if you all did the same. No one calls me James, except for…my parents” He paused for a second “But I guess they won’t call me that now either” Steve stopped and looked at Bucky, worry and the inevitable question in his eyes. Before he could ask, Bucky already started explaining. “They died about two weeks ago. The rain. I actually wanted them to come with me to a bunker, but they were too stubborn to listen to me.” Steve frowned “I’m so sorry” he said. It sounded genuine, like he actually meant it “Will you be okay?” Bucky looked at him, realized how close he was and instinctively took a step back “Yes. Thank you.” Steve smiled weakly and continued to walk towards a blue painted door. “This is yours. Sam and Pepper prepared it for you while you were asleep.” Steve said. Bucky nodded “I assume I’ll meet them too tomorrow?” “Yes” Steve said and chuckled.

Bucky opened the door and was surprised to find a room that looked pretty normal and comfy, except for the fact that it lacked any windows. Instead there was an air vent beneath the ceiling. A cozy looking bed stood in the middle of the room, big enough for two people, a large wardrobe stood at the wall. A desk was in there too with a small lamp. The walls were painted in a warm green. Steve noticed Bucky’s surprised face and chuckled “Just because it’s the end of the world outside, doesn’t mean people have forgotten how to live properly. You should get some rest, it’s past midnight. I’ll wake you up at 8 am tomorrow, so that you’ll have some time to freshen up before meeting the rest of the crew. Good night!”

“Good Night” Bucky said, but Steve had already closed the door behind him and left Bucky in the warmly lit room. There was a mirror on the wall and Bucky walked over to look at himself. He looked pretty unkempt and dirty, he had to admit. His hair had gotten too long and so had his beard. Steve had been right, this was no way to present himself to the people he might would live with for the rest of his life.

This Steve. He was nice. Bucky had felt comfortable in his presence, safe, like the world could not do him any harm. Bucky knew that there was some strange german word for that feeling, but it didn’t come to mind. He noticed that someone had put a fresh set of pyjamas on the bed in the middle of the room, Bucky’s bed. The bed he would now call his own for a very long time. The realization had to sink in, but Bucky found it rather comforting. This place seemed safe and friendly. But he knew that he hadn’t met everybody and he already knew that there was some sort of hierarchy in here. In a way he was anxious about all the new things that were waiting for him, but on the other hand he was thankful for even being alive, which he would not be if these people hadn’t found him.

He started to strip off his clothes and laid them on the small chair next to the desk. He stood in the room for a moment, butt-naked, and looked at himself in the mirror. He had always taken care of his physique, which might’ve been why he had survived in the radiation for as long as he’d done, but also maybe that had just been his luck. He wasn’t as dirty as they probably had found him, but he did still look forward to taking a shower. That was also something people didn’t do as often as they’d used to. The water had gotten too toxic and it could be fatal, if you didn’t have a water filter in your home. Some people simply could not afford that, so they had to get water from the store. The world had gotten very unfriendly.

He slipped into the pyjamas which were surprisingly soft and smelled nice as well. Damn, I’m really not used to basic living standards anymore, am I?, Bucky thought as he got under the covers. There was a light switch next to his bed and the room went completely black as he turned off the light. It felt safe. At home he had had no curtains, it had never been entirely dark. Faint memories, these were. Bucky fell asleep in a matter of seconds. It was the best sleep he’d ever had.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It would mean the world to me if you left kudos or/and a feedback! Thank you for reading!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTENT WARNINGS: Razors

A loud banging noise ripped Bucky from dreams of his childhood, rather pleasant dreams those had been. It was a shame he was being pulled back to reality. It took him about 5 seconds to remember where he was. Bunker. NY-23. Steve. It took him another 5 seconds to locate the banging noise. It was coming from his door and while at first Bucky had assumed something bad was happening he now realized that someone was just apparently very eagerly trying to get his attention by banging on the door from the outside. After a glance on the small clock on his nightstand Bucky remembered. It was exactly 8 am, the time Steve had said he would wake him up the night before. “Yes? Come in.” Bucky shouted in between bangs so that Steve, or at least he hoped it was Steve, could hear him on the other side of the door. The banging stopped and the door opened very slowly, only enough to let Steve poke his head through and look into the room. “You almost tear down my entire door, but don’t dare to come in properly?” Bucky asked jokingly and sat up in his bed. “I don’t know, you could have been naked or something, ya know?” Steve said with a subtle smirk. “Well, I could do something about that” Bucky said and grinned. Was he flirting? _Get a fucking grip, Barnes_ , he thought to himself, _you met this dude literally yesterday._ Steve on the other hand just returned the grin. “Let’s save that for later” he said and returned to his serious look. _That_ , Bucky thought, _was a flirt back._

But as Steve seemed to have gone back to strict business Bucky decided to do the same. “I’m gonna show you to the showers. After that I’ll get Wanda, she’ll help you with shaving and trimming your hair and such. She used to be a hairdresser. Well, I guess she still is, but she’s obviously not in business anymore. So, don’t worry, it won’t cost you anything.” He smiled and looked over at Bucky who was still sitting on his bed. He stood up and ran both hands through his thick, brown hair, which was really, really greasy. Bucky assumed that he smelled too. “I feel like I haven’t showered in a year” he said and yawned “That’s probably not even an exaggeration.” Steve looked at him questioningly. As they started walking out of the room and to the bathrooms, Bucky began to explain. “Shortly after everyone bailed town a year and a half ago, they cut off the water supply in our city. On top of that the water pipes in our house were broken as well. So I always had to wash myself with water from the well or from a nearby pond, although those were almost always contaminated. My parents didn’t have a lot of money, never did. And when our city became a ghost town we had to survive on the bare minimum for almost two years” Steve had been listening the entire time, a frown forming on his forehead. “That sounds terrible, I’m so sorry” he said and put his hand on Bucky’s shoulder. Still not yet used again to human touch, Bucky was startled by the sudden weight on his shoulder and must’ve jumped a little because Steve immediately removed his hand from Bucky’s shoulder. “No sorry” Bucky said and felt ashamed for behaving like a complete weirdo, “I’m just not used to…touch anymore”

Only now that he was interacting with other people again he began to realize how badly his parents’ isolated lifestyle had affected him. And he had only met one out of the whole bunch. Steve put his hand back on Bucky’s shoulder and gave it a light squeeze. “You don’t have to apologize for anything. Many people arrive here at these bunkers as confused and not used to humans as you.” “Did you?” Bucky asked and immediately felt like he was stepping too close to Steve’s personal life. “I did” Steve said suddenly quieter than before and for a moment he stared out into the hallway, eyes not focused, like he was deep in thought, remembering something. But after a few seconds he went back to his normal expression and smiled “But this isn’t about me. I’m alright.” His smile seemed to wide “Let’s get you presentable” he said and stopped in front of a tinted glass door with a big M on it. “Here we are. Wanda will pick you up here in 30 minutes, so don’t take too long.” “I won’t” Bucky said with a smile, opened the door to the bathroom and locked it shut behind him.

In conclusion, there were two things he knew about Steve so far. He was a flirt and he obviously had some sort of secret that had something to do with his arrival at the bunker, that he apparently didn’t want to talk about. Bucky undressed himself and put his clothes into a basket that said “dirty clothes” on it. Someone had also left a pile of fresh clothing on a stool that had a little sticky note on it that said “James. Welcome home.” Bucky didn’t know who had written that, but the person obviously knew his name. Steve must’ve told them last night. He smiled at the note. It didn’t quite feel like home just yet, but the thought of it was nice. In the shower, which looked really expensive, there were a selection of different shower gels and shampoos and Bucky began to ask himself where these people were getting their supplies from. He stepped under the showerhead and turned the knob to turn on the faucet.

The water that came out was hot, soft and didn’t smell like sulfur, which the water Bucky had washed himself with for a long time had. Bucky had to bear down a small moan. He hadn’t noticed until now how much he’d actually missed showering and under what comparatively horrible circumstances he had been living before. For a few minutes he just let the water run over him, enjoying the sensation of the warm droplets running down his shoulders, the warmth unclenching his muscles, before he grabbed a bottle of shampoo and started washing his hair, enjoying the piny smell of the shampoo. He then started to rub body wash all over himself to get rid of the smell that had been sticking to him for he didn’t know how long. This was almost better than sex, Bucky thought. Another thing he hadn’t had in a very long time. He started to wonder how these things were regulated in these bunkers, but he figured, he would find out. Bucky looked at the clock at the wall and realized he had stood in the shower for almost 20 minutes so he stopped the water and stepped out to grab one of the fresh towels that were hanging on the wall to dry first his hair and then the rest of his body. He slipped into the new clothing which, next to underwear, consisted of a comfortable pair of chinos and a navy blue sweater. Steve hadn’t been wrong, people really still knew how to live. It gave him hope, although he still asked himself where they got their water and all of the other things from, that were provided to him like he was on a cruiseship from the last century.

He stepped out of the bathroom, feeling like a new person. A brunette woman was leaning at the wall next to the bathroom door and was inspecting her fingernails. Her long hair covered her face, but only until she lifted her gaze as the door fell shut. She let her eyes roam up and down Bucky’s entire body, seeming surprised, which made Bucky feel a little uncomfortable. She smiled and extended her hand for Bucky to shake. “You’re Bucky, right? I’m Wanda Maximoff” Bucky shook her hand and returned her smile “I see Steve already filled you all in on who I am” he said and chuckled. “Well, I have to know whose hair I’m taking care of, no?” Wanda said and laughed “Come on, we better hurry up or we’ll end up late for the meeting” She took Bucky’s arm and started walking a few steps down the hallway before she stopped in front of another door and opened it for Bucky. “Take a seat” she said and smiled. The room was quite small, there was a mirror with an armchair and a small table in front of it. On the table there were some scissors, a razor, some shaving foam, a comb and a hairbrush. Essentials. On the wall there was a small sink with an equally as small cupboard. Bucky sat down in the armchair and looked at himself in the mirror, while Wanda took a seat behind him on a small stool. “I’m gonna shave your beard first, alright?” Wanda said and Bucky nodded. He would probably still manage getting his beard off by himself but he assumed that Wanda would be a lot better at it. 

“So, how long have you been living here?” Bucky asked, while Wanda started applying the shaving foam and switched on the razor. “Oh, not for very long. My brother and I arrived about five months ago. You were the first to arrive after we did. I think Tony is the one who’s been here the longest. Except for Mr. Pierce of course” Bucky nodded. He realized that the razor was connected to an electric outlet in the wall. “Where do you guys get your supplies from? I mean your water, your power, all that. It all got cut off at home.” “Did you live near here?” Wanda asked. The past tense in her question gave a little sting to Bucky’s chest. “Yeah, like half an hour away” he replied. “Well, all the supplies from the perimeter of about 20 miles are being redirected to this bunker. Mr. Pierce has a lot of money so he made a deal with the responsible companies. There’s very little people in the perimeter of this bunker, minus you, probably almost none at all. It’s a lot less than in other areas. That’s why we were all very surprised to find you”

She was almost done with shaving Bucky’s beard now, only took care of a few leftover hairs here and there. Bucky almost didn’t recognize himself. He had not seen himself without a beard for what felt like a very long time. It brought out his features. “Look at you” Wanda said and smiled, content with her work “Fresh out of the oven” Bucky smiled and touched his face, which felt unfamiliar, and thought about what Wanda had said. Now the expensive showers also made sense. No matter how bad it got, money still seemed to rule the world. Wanda now started inspecting his hair. “You know what?” she said “I don’t even think it looks that bad with this length. I’m just gonna trim a little bit, so that it looks a little cleaner, alright?” she asked. Bucky shrugged his shoulders. “You’re the expert”

Cutting the hair didn’t take very long, only about fifteen minutes, but Bucky felt better about himself afterwards. Wanda took a look at the clock and started packing her supplies back into the small cupboard. “Let’s go” she said “Mr. Pierce doesn’t like it when you’re late”

The meeting room wasn’t a long way from where they were coming from. But despite the short way Bucky managed to get so nervous that his heart was pounding against his ribcage by the time they arrived at the door to the meeting room. He hadn’t been in a situation involving more than three people in several years. Wanda opened the door for him and gave him a reassuring look, almost as if she knew how anxious he was right now. Upon entering the room he was surprised at how small it was. There was an oval table in the middle at which the rest of the crew sat and a few screens at the wall that were showing an overview of the bunkers data and inventory. Eight pairs of eyes were suddenly glued to Bucky. He spotted Steve at the other end of the table. “James, Wanda” he heard someone say. The voice belonged to the man next to Steve who was now standing up and extended his hand to point at the last free chairs “Take a seat please” Bucky obeyed and sat down, so did Wanda. “Crew, this is your new roommate. As you all know he arrived six days ago, after having collapsed outside in the radiation. But thanks to Tony, Steve and Bruce’s Anti-Radiation Tech we were able to find him and patch him up, as you can see.” The man said to the crew, then turned to Bucky “Welcome to NY-23, James. I’m Alexander Pierce.” So, this was that Mr. Pierce. Bucky didn’t like the judgemental undertone in his voice and how he talked about him to the others like he was a stupid little bitch, who didn’t know how dangerous the world was. “Pleasure” Bucky replied, well aware of the annoyed undertone and of the fact that he was making a terrible first impression on this Mr. Pierce, but he didn’t care. Mr. Pierce had also made a bad first impression on him. Bucky spotted Steve smirking discretely at the table.

“Alright” Mr. Pierce continued “I just have a few things to say and then I’ll leave you all to get acquainted.” So he obviously wasn’t part of the team. Not really. “The water pipes in the west wing need a Check-up, the last one was over six months ago and you know that we’re actually supposed to do one every five months. Scott, Tony, please take care of that.” Two men nodded, one of them obviously Tony, the other one who had found him. Mr. Pierce continued. “Sam. Pepper, laundry’s due.” The man sitting on Steve’s other side rolled his eyes. “As for the rest of you, I have no particular tasks for you. But try to be productive.” With these words he exited the room through a door at the other side of the room. As soon as the door fell shut, the man called Sam started complaining. “That’s not fair, man” he exclaimed “No one else in the house ever gotta do the laundry except me” “Relax” the blonde woman, who Bucky assumed was Pepper, said “there’s worse tasks, honestly” Sam didn’t seem too convinced but didn’t say anything else.

The next thirty minutes were filled with people introducing themselves to Bucky, asking where he was from and all sorts of other questions. Bucky tried really hard to remember all their names. There was Bruce, the scientist, Tony and Scott, the mechanics, Sam and Pepper, who were apparently the “laundry team” as Sam described it, Pietro, Wanda’s brother, who was a great cook and Natasha, who had been a fitness trainer before she had been forced to leave her home. Socialising felt good, being the centre of attention felt unusual, but not bad as well. Bucky felt welcomed, safe, genuinely happy actually. An emotion that had gotten so unfamiliar, that Bucky had almost forgotten what it felt like. The last few years hadn’t been easy.

After a while everybody went to work. Even though Mr. Pierce hadn’t assigned tasks to everyone, all of them seemed to know what to do. In the end there was only Steve left in the room with him. “Do you not have something to do?” Bucky asked him. “Not really” he replied and looked up at Bucky, his eyes roaming up and down Bucky’s body for maybe a _little_ too long. “Neither do you, I reckon” Steve said and smiled at him “Why don’t I show you around the bunker a little bit? What do you say?” Bucky locked his gaze with Steve’s and returned his smile. Was this another flirtation? “Sure, I’d love that” Bucky said. “Awesome” Steve said and stood up, offering Bucky a look at his muscular upper body, as he was wearing only a tight Henley and not a stiff jacket, as the night before. Now it was Bucky who was staring. “Come on, let’s go” Steve said with a smile and started to walk out of the room. Bucky smiled to himself as he followed Steve down the hallway. _Not so bad,_ he thought, _for the end of the world._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kudos and comments really make my heart go WHOOSH so please tell me what you think thank youuu!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warnings: Mentions of Miscarriage, Mentions of Death, Child Loss

2 weeks later

 

“I’m pregnant”

Bucky looked up from his fingernails, which he had been inspecting for the entire duration of the meeting up until that point, and looked at Pepper, standing at the other end of the table, who had just said these two words.

He was surprised, of course, he hadn’t before known Pepper was with someone in the bunker.

“Well, that’s good news then” Mr. Pierce said with a reassuring, but plastic smile. “Good job! You’re doing humanity a favour.”

He started clapping and everyone else joined in, except for Pepper and Tony, which lead Bucky to the assumption that the baby Pepper apparently was pregnant with was his. They smiled, but didn’t seem too overly emotional, like one would expect maybe. Neither did any of the others. They clapped, sure, showed approval. But it was like they were congratulating someone for holding a good speech. What a weird way to react to a pregnancy, Bucky thought, all the while clapping as well, not to be rude or anything. He was also confused about Mr. Pierce’s words. They sounded so…robotic, in a way. Like a website that says, “Thank you for donating!” or “Thank you for voting!”. It felt weird. A couple of people quietly said something to the two, but carefully, in a way. Again, nobody seemed to really be happy about it.

 

After the meeting Bucky decided to ask and went up to Steve, who was already walking down the hallway, probably on his way to one of the smaller computers which were broken and needed fixing.

“Hey, what was that earlier?” he asked, eyeing Steve from the side.

“What do you mean?” Steve asked absentmindedly, while looking at his phone and walking in a quick pace, so Bucky had trouble keeping up with him

“During the meeting. When Pepper announced that she was pregnant. No one seemed, I don’t know, overly happy or exited about it. Not even her and Tony.”

Steve looked up at Bucky and smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile.

He looked at Bucky and said: “That’s because as soon as that baby is born, it’s going to get taken away. For its own good. We don’t have the capacity to raise children in here. The outside is too dangerous for a toddler and we can’t exactly keep a small child inside all the time. It’s gonna get transported to a special child raising bunker in an environment that is not as heavily polluted with radiation as this one. One where they can go outside without danger.”

“So, an orphanage?”

“If you wanna call it that” Steve said and opened the door to the tech room in which the broken computer was standing “Except almost none of the children’s parents there are dead. Just in other bunkers.”

“That’s awful” Bucky said

“Yeah, it is” Steve said as he started to screw the computer open to remove the control panel “Most people nowadays only have kids for the sake of humanity not dying out” He chuckled, then his expression went blank again. Just like when Bucky had asked him about his arrival at the bunker when he first had gotten here. Like he was remembering something he’d rather not. “Well, I didn’t” he then said.

“You had kids?” Bucky asked, but didn’t get an answer.

Steve was now looking down at the panel in his hands, trying to figure out what the problem with the software was.

He looked up, distanced, almost cold.

“Don’t you have work to do?”

A cold, strict tone, that sent an icy chill down Bucky’s spine.

“Yeah” Bucky said, accepting that he wouldn’t get an answer out of him. In fact, he didn’t really have a lot of work to do, but he thought it best if he left Steve alone now.

He went out of the room. Steve didn’t say anything else.

Over the past two weeks he had gotten to know Steve a little better, completed tasks in the bunker with him, had gone on outside missions with him, they had eaten dinner together, shared a few good laughs, but still, Bucky felt like he didn’t know a damn thing about the man.

And now his feeling had been proven right once again. Steve had, very obviously, lost a lot.

He decided to go look for Wanda, another person he had grown quite fond of during the few weeks he had been here. He went for her room first, which wasn’t very far from his own. He knocked on the door, but got no answer. He knocked a second time, again, no answer. He tried to turn the knob, but it seemed like the door was locked. Wanda didn’t usually lock her room, so Bucky was confused at first, but decided not to think too much of it.

He eventually found her in one of the living rooms, sitting on a couch, reading a book. He sat down facing her, on the sofa on the opposite of the one she was sitting on. She looked up from her book and put it down next to her.

“Hey, you” she said smiling “I see you don’t really have anything to do either”

“No, guess not” Bucky said.

Technically there were a few things he could do, like vacuuming the floor in their hallway or checking the water pipes for pollution, but none of that really had a priority.

“I’m happy for Pepper and Tony” Wanda said, breaking the silence. “Even though they won’t ever really know their baby.” She looked off into the distance. “It’s a shame that things are this way”

“Damn straight” Bucky replied and started fidgeting with the buttons on the sleeves of his shirt. He tended to do that whenever he started talking with someone about some sort of delicate topic.

He would’ve given anything to have been born about 150 years earlier. This world sucked. The fact that people had to live in bunkers with an air lock, to survive, sucked. It sucked, that children needed to be taken away from their parents in order to even have a chance at growing up well. It sucked that Bucky, and for that matter no one else in the bunker, would ever get to see other countries, hell, not even other corners of the country they were in.

“Pepper and Tony have had four kids so far” Wanda said and looked at Bucky “All of them are somewhere in the Washington area, I think”

Four. Four children they had had to give away. No wonder the two of them acted the way they did. Pepper was all niceness and smiles all the time, but Bucky had always suspected she was trying to conceal something with it. Same with Tony. He was always loud, cracking jokes, making people laugh, but Bucky had found, that he was too happy sometimes, laughed too loudly.

“Nat and Bruce” Wanda continued “they had a kid too. A little girl. She didn’t make it. Before, Nat had thought she was infertile, for a very long time. I can only imagine how happy she was when she found out that she was pregnant. I was here when the baby was born though, it’s only three months ago. They were devastated.”

Wanda looked at him. Bucky  could see that she was feeling similar as he was right now. Angry and sad at the world as it was right now.

“We can’t change the way things are unfortunately” she said and picked her book up again. “We just have to accept them”

Bucky leaned back, while Wanda continued to read her book.

Bucky stood up and left Wanda to her book. He would actually go outside to check the water pipes now. He’d never checked the panels that were outside of the bunker, but it basically just meant looking at a screen and pressing a few buttons.

Down the hallway, he didn’t meet anyone else. Bucky figured that they would all be caught up somewhere else, the bunker was big after all. Next to the big airlock door that led to the outside was a tall wardrobe with protective clothing for the outside. All developed by Bruce. The man was a real genius. Without these clothes Bucky would probably collapse again and possibly not make it this time. He put on the heavy jacket and pants and the oxygen mask. The mask was necessary, because the air outside was filled with micro particles of toxic metals and loads of other chemicals from nearby factories.

After Bucky’s arrival Steve had educated him on the fact that the environment the bunker was in, was so heavily radiating, that it was basically impossible to walk around in it without any sort of protection. It had some of the most toxic air in the entire state of New York, he had said.

“What about New York City?” Bucky had asked, assuming that a big city like that should have air that was way worse than somewhere in the Upstate. He’d never been there.

“New York City is under a dome” Steve had replied, anger and disgust in his voice “technology only the government has access to. They pump in fresh oxygen constantly through huge air filters. Only the rich live there now. It’s almost impossible to get in. People have died in front of the gates because they had to wait for their permit too long. There are these huge slums in front of the city gates, filled with people desperate to get into the city to breathe fresh air, but it costs money. So people work their asses off, live in these slums their entire life, always hoping, always waiting to have enough money to get in but, as soon as they do, they lift up the price. These slums have formed on their own, but the people there, the poor sons of bitches who work in the factories from dusk till dawn every fucking day, are a great producer of resources for the rich assholes in the city.”

Bucky thought about the bitterness in Steve’s voice, almost as if he’d lived in these slums as well, almost as if he’d experience the injustice he’d described, first hand.

Bucky was only able to make assumptions about Steve’s past and it made him nervous.

He figured he’d find out, at some later point. After all he’d known the man for not very long. But he cared about him, he could feel it. Something about him was different than the others and it wasn’t just that he’d been the first one Bucky had had contact with.

Bucky thought about these things, as he opened the heavy door and stepped out into a mildly windy weather. He closed it behind him, carefully. There were a few different signs on the massive stone wall, one of them said “Water Pipes Check”. Bucky started walking, feet heavy in the stiff clothing. He thought about Steve again.

It was strange, the thing that they had going on. Bucky often thought about the little flirt they had had on his first proper day. He thought about, how afterwards, Steve had never brought it up again nor had made any flirtatious comments again. He had been nice to Bucky, sure, shown him around and Bucky would even dare to describe him as a friend. But there was still that secrecy. That godawful feeling that he didn’t know the first thing about Steve Rogers. And he wanted to. He wanted to know everything about him, he wanted to know his fears, what he loved, he wanted to know about his parents, his school, everything. He wanted to be close to Steve, feel like he really cared for Bucky, feel…loved.

Could it be, that…?, a small voice in Bucky’s head started saying.

No. No, Bucky thought, it could not be. It was wrong, it was…not the way things were supposed to be. It wouldn’t benefit humanity, as Mr. Pierce would say.

But still…

The little voice wouldn’t shut up, so Bucky shook his head, in an attempt to shake all these distracting thoughts away as he walked up to the panel that showed the pollution data of the water pipes. All well. All in order. Just as Bucky had thought.

He was about to start to walk back, but he noticed something in the corner of his eye. There was a little path, that led away from the main way that was going around the bunker. It was almost like it wasn’t actually meant to be there, only formed by feet walking over it repetitively. He followed it, curious to see what was at the other end. It led him to a small clearing that was surrounded by a few dead bushes.

Bucky quickly realized what the small clearing was and a wave of sadness surged over him. It was a graveyard. A few stones were there with writing on them.

_Antonina Romanova-Banner_

_12.03.2135-12.03.2135_

Nat and Bruce’s little girl, Bucky assumed. It had devastated him before, but seeing this tiny stone, with the little flower engraving and the half rotten teddy bear, that was sitting on the gravestone, was even worse.

There were two more, next to each other.

Bucky stepped closer to them to read the names written on them. What he read almost took his breath away.

_Margaret “Peggy” Carter_

_23.04.2105-16.08.2132_

And next to that, on the smaller one:

_Sarah Carter-Rogers_

_09.01.2127-15.08.2132_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed this chapter! Leave kudos and comments if you wanna make a bitch happy :)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Mentions of sexual abuse, Mentions of prostitution, Past Trauma, Panic Attacks, Mentions of loss.

Bucky’s room was merely being illuminated by the small lamp on his desk now. It was late, past midnight probably, but Bucky found it useless to try and go to sleep. He wouldn’t be able to, he could feel it. Either it was because of the three coffee’s he’d had earlier in order to not pass out while checking some files for Mr.Pierce, (he had been tired then, because the night before that he had also barely slept. It was an endless cycle, or at least it would turn out to be if he didn’t get his shit together) or it was because of the fact that his thoughts were still racing about the discovery he had made. It had been a few days, since he had discovered the graveyard, that small, sad little clearing. This was certainly not how he had wanted to find out about Steve’s past, but here he was, feeling conflicted, feeling guilty for having found out something that Steve obviously tried so eagerly to forget, to keep a secret from Bucky. He would have to tell him about it at some point. He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to see that empty expression return to his face, no, he didn’t want Steve to suffer in the way he obviously was. He didn’t know how to confront him about it either.

_“Hey, Steve, how’s it going? Good? Fabulous, oh, by the way I found your dead wife’s and daughter’s graves outside. Oh, and also I might be in love with you, how’s that sound?”_

Bucky shook his head and let it sink into his hands. He was such a damn fool. A child. An idiot. God, he was such a fucking idiot.

His feelings confused him.

He had never been in love before, hell, he didn’t even really know what love was. He’d seen it on TV, sure, but felt it? Never.

He had fucked, hell, he had fucked a lot when he had been younger, but that wasn’t love. That was desperate. Desperate to feel something like ecstasy, while the world around you is ending. He had been fucked too. He had been paid to be used and Bucky, like the broke son of a bitch he had been, had let anyone use him. Many were prostitutes these days. It was easy money.

He didn’t want to think about it. Not ever. It was something he was trying to forget.

Bucky’s mind was racing at a pace he couldn’t keep up with. Voices got loud, voices of guilt, voices of shame, voices that had long been silent, that now got loud again, because, despite not wanting to, he had thought about his shameful past.

_Slut! Whore! You’re disgusting, you dirty slut!_

Bucky buried his face deeper in his hands, his fingernails digging deep into his skin.

He didn’t want to think about it, god, he never wanted to think about it again.

No. no. no.

_Slut!_

No.

_Whore!_

No!

_Slut!_

“Shut up!” Bucky shouted out loud. He let go of his head and realized how fast he was breathing, how he was shaking all over.

“God, I’m a mess” Bucky said to the empty room and let his face sink in his face again.

Sobs started to shake him. His chest hurt.

How messed up was he that a simple feeling like attraction, a thing everyone experienced, could send him so far down memory lane. His past had nothing to do with who he was today. Nothing at all.

He tried to hammer that one soothing thought into his brain as hard as he could, all the while his breathing going hard and laboured, when he heard a knock on the door.

His heart skipped a beat, as he was not expecting anyone to be awake at this hour. Maybe it was Wanda who had heard him from her room.

There was another knock. More eager this time.

“Yes” Bucky said as loudly as he could. He was exhausted. “Come in. Please”

But it wasn’t Wanda who stepped through the door. It was Steve. Bucky froze. Oh no.

“Hey, are you alright? Were you talking to someone?” Steve asked.

Bucky felt like Steve’s blue eyes were looking right into him, right into his brain, like they could see what he knew. He felt dizzy.

“Hey!” Steve said “Bucky are you listening to me?” The expression on his face was seriously worried.

_Get a grip,_ Bucky thought.

“Yeah, no I…” Bucky began. He didn’t even know how to begin to explain. “I wasn’t…I wasn’t talking to anyone no…I just…I get flashbacks and I…” He took a deep breath because he could feel the panic rising up his chest again.

“Breathe, Bucky, you’re fine” Steve said, softly, and grabbed Bucky’s shoulders “Hey, look at me, you’re fine”

 “Yeah, I…It’s just that….I..” Bucky stuttered. He didn’t even know where he was going with his sentence now, but the tight feeling in his chest was going away. He could breathe again.

“It’s okay, you don’t have to explain” Steve said and gave him a reassuring smile “Sit down, here”

Steve sat down on Bucky’s bed and pulled Bucky down next to him. Without thinking about it, Bucky let his head fall on Steve’s shoulder. Steve let it happen.

Bucky had had panic attacks before, for the same reasons. Through one thought or another, memories of his past on the street popped up like unwanted ads on a computer screen that send the computer into malfunction. He’d never been comforted like this before though. His parents had dismissed it. He had left after a big fight they had had when he had been 18 and lived on the street after. That was how he’d gotten into prostitution. Trying to get by. When he had gone back to his parents house three years later they had taken him back in, but every time he would wake up screaming because of nightmares about people who had been less nice to him, or when he had a panic attack, they would mostly ignore it. “You put this on yourself, James”.

This, now, was new and it felt good.

“Thank you, Steve” he mumbled and looked up at him. Steve looked back and there was something in Steve’s eyes. A mutual sadness, melancholy, a longing to be near someone, and loss, god, so much loss. It was unbearable. Bucky lifted his head and faced Steve. Two broken little humans, sitting on a bed together, while the world is ending around them.

 He lifted his hand, automatically even, like he had no control over his hands anymore and cupped Steve’s jaw with it, felt the scruffiness of his beard on the palm of his hand.

Steve looked at him, surprised, but not like he didn’t want to let it happen. He lifted his own hand and cupped Bucky’s with it, grabbing it, like he desperately needed something to hold on to. He turned his face a little and pressed a careful kiss into Bucky’s palm. Bucky was perplexed, he felt like his brain had just shut off and he was watching his body do whatever it wanted right now.

He looked at Steve, with tired eyes, tired eyes looked back. He didn’t even notice their faces getting closer, but suddenly his lips were on Steve’s.

_How did this happen?_

Bucky gave in to it. The feeling was good, so good. A type of good Bucky hadn’t before known, existed. Steve lips, they felt like heaven on earth. Like the home Bucky had never had. He wanted more, wanted closure, skin on skin. He shifted closer and grabbed Steve by the waist. Steve gave in and released a moan into Bucky’s mouth.

Bucky smiled, tiredly, he wanted to let Steve take dominance.

Steve’s hand was now laying on the small of Bucky’s back while their kiss got more eager. Before he knew what happened Steve’s tongue was in Bucky’s mouth and god, he tasted delicious. Like coffee and cigarettes. Like the pine forests Bucky had visited as a child, when trees hadn’t been as rare as they were now. Bucky devoured every breath he got from Steve, he felt his own body fill with adrenalin, oxytocin, endorphins, better than drugs. It was like Steve filled him with life, with life that Bucky had wasted and lost a long time ago.

Steve drew his hands under Bucky’s shirt and started caressing his back, up and down, up and down, as if he was still trying to comfort him. Bucky felt the knot in his chest loosening, he felt the dizziness waving off. He was so goddamn thankful for Steve’s presence, he wanted to tell him, he wanted to tell him how much this mattered to him.

He was aware that, if anyone walked in right now, they were done. They would get thrown out, into the wild, possibly without protection and be left to die, or be smart enough to find a way to survive maybe. This was risky, it was wrong, it wasn’t allowed, but, _god,_ how could something that felt so right, that made Bucky feel so safe, be forbidden. He smiled into Steve’s mouth and pulled him closer.

Steve’s mouth left Bucky’s and travelled down his neck, leaving little kisses all the way down to Bucky’s broad shoulders. Bucky moaned softly, contently, tiredly.

But then Steve stopped suddenly. Bucky could feel him taking his lips away from Bucky’s skin and resting his forehead against Bucky’s shoulder instead. Bucky looked down at him,  he looked like a little child trying to hide its face. Then Steve started crying. Sobs started to shake him, Bucky could feel his tears slowly wetting his shirt.

“I’m sorry” Steve said and lifted his head, looking at Bucky with red and swollen eyes, “I just…I can’t do this, Bucky”

Bucky could feel a sting piercing through his heart, like a lighting bolt that strikes a tree.

“Is it…is it because of me?” Bucky asked, worry and shame in his voice, feeling his chest tightening up again “Did I do something wrong?”

“No, you…” Steve said and huffed a teary laugh. He cupped Bucky’s cheek “You made me feel as alive as I haven’t in a long time, Bucky, it’s just that…I can’t…You know? I just can’t”

He stood up and walked towards the door, pulling his slightly deranged shirt in place again.

Bucky knew why, oh god, he knew why Steve couldn’t. It wasn’t only because it was generally wrong. It was because of what he had lost.

“I saw” Bucky said quickly, just before Steve was about to walk into the hallway and possibly to his room. “I…I saw the graveyard. I came across it the other day while I was outside, I… I’m so sorry, Steve, I’m so, so sorry.”

Steve turned around to look at him, tears still glistening in his eyes, a sad smile on his face. At least he didn’t seem mad.

“Well, then you know why I can’t do this” he said and looked at the ground, as if he was trying to avoid Bucky’s gaze, who was still sitting on the now slightly messed up bed. “Good night, Bucky”

And with that he was out. Bucky could still hear his steps for a while, but then he was gone. Now they were both alone again.

Bucky let himself fall on his bed and stared at the grey ceiling.

_What just happened?_

He tried to process the last thirty minutes, he tried to sort it all inside his synapses, but it was just one big cloud of confusion, deteriorating arousal and pain.

His breathing was back to normal, he hadn’t had a full blown panic attack, he had had worse, but still, he felt like Steve had saved his life. He felt like his lips were his only safe haven now, he wanted more of them, wanted more of Steve. But Steve couldn’t. Steve couldn’t because he was still mourning, because this probably also brought back memories to him. Pleasant ones, that now hurt like a dagger through the heart whenever you think of them.

He could understand, in a way, he didn’t blame Steve for pulling away, he didn’t blame him for anything. He was just as screwed up as Bucky was.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a lot of anxiety about publishing this, because it tackles a few sensitive things that can easily be portrayed inaccurately. I didn't to exessive research on panic attacks and trauma for this and can, next to the portion of research that I did, only tell this based on my own experiences with panic attacks and trauma. If you think my portrayal is innacurate, tell me and I'll do my best to fix it, I don't want to offend anyone.  
> Further, I, of course, hope you enjoyed this chapter.  
> Please let me know in the comments if you liked it and leave a kudo if you did.  
> Thank you xx


	6. Steve's POV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Death, Mentions of suicide attempts, Loss of family, Fire

Steve stared at the ceiling. He had been staring at the ceiling for two hours. Or was it? Maybe it was more, maybe less, he didn’t count. He felt guilty, he felt wrong, he felt like he was betraying Peggy, he felt like his whole life had suddenly been flipped over, shaken and then carelessly been thrown at him again.

He could still feel Bucky’s kiss on his lips, he could still feel the scruffiness of Bucky’s beard on his face, he could feel his tongue licking along Bucky’s, he could still feel the ecstasy that had surged through him, the hunger, the need for skin on skin, before all of that had been consumed by the ever returning grief, the ever returning hole in his gut, that could never be shut completely and that was so easily ripped open again.

He shifted onto his side and looked at the wall for a change, aware of the fact, that Bucky was probably staring at a similar wall right now, possibly thinking about the same things as he was.

Steve didn’t know how all that could’ve happened. He had heard Bucky shouting in his room, after he had taken a last stroll through the bunker, to check if all air locks were properly closed, if everyone was in their rooms, just to routinely check if everything had been in order. It was. But Bucky hadn’t been.

Bucky had just seemed so lost, so hurt, so…vulnerable and he had reminded Steve of himself. Now, he didn’t know what had happened in Bucky’s past that had screwed him up as bad as it obviously had, but it must’ve been bad. Bucky’s scream had sounded so desperate and so angry, Steve had been unable to just walk past his room without looking inside to see if he was alright.

He knew that if they had gone any further, they would’ve gone all the way. All the way into a sort of bliss Steve hadn’t experienced in a long time, not since…  but they hadn’t. Steve had put an end to it and he knew that he had hurt Bucky’s feelings with it, he knew that it was unfair, but it was just not something he could do right now. It reminded him too much of Peggy. Of the way her skin had smelled, when he had kissed her neck like that, how her naked waist had felt under his hands, how her body, her face, how _she_ had looked, when they’d gone all the way.

Steve stood up, shaking his head, mostly at himself for not being able to lock these memories away. He couldn’t bring her back.

In a small drawer on his desk, he kept an old plush rabbit. It wasn’t his, it was Sarah’s. He had bought it for her on the market, in the slums. It had almost cost all the money he had made on that day and they still had had to buy food, but the way his little girl’s face had lit up, when he had handed the plushie to her was worth more than all the food he could’ve possibly gotten. She had been four years old then, unknowing about the fact that, in under a year, she would be dead.

It was a nice memory. But it hurt just as much as all the other nice memories.

They’d gotten here three years ago. In the slum outside New York City, where they had lived, there had been an uprising. Workers, mostly, protesting against the government and the rich bastards in the big city. The police had brutally shot them down, set houses on fire, and well, the houses were tightly crammed in the slums so eventually it hit Steve’s house as well. He had grabbed Peggy and Sarah as fast as he could and had made a way out of the slum, to get them to safety, so save them from the flaming inferno that was consuming house after house. They’d had nothing but the clothes on their bodies and possibly a good amount of smoke particles in their lungs when they had started to run. Steve had heard of the bunker before, some computers did exist in the slums and he’d done some research in case anything like that ever happened and he would need to get his family to safety quickly.

So he walked, carrying his crying daughter all the way, Peggy next to him, also crying at some points. But she had tried to keep it together, she really did. She’d been so strong, always. Giving birth to Sarah, she had almost died, but she had pushed through and eventually survived. And that she did now as well. Which is why Steve had believed all the way that she was okay, that she would make it.

But she didn’t

Just as Bucky had, Steve woke up in the bunker, with no memory of how he’d gotten there. He had figured, someone had found them outside, passed out probably.

He remembered feeling awful, feeling guilty for putting his family in danger like that. But still, at that point he had still believed that they were alive.

Tony had been the one to tell him. Steve hadn’t known his name then, he had just seen him as an incredibly clean looking brown haired man, who told him that his family was dead.

He hadn’t even gotten a chance to say goodbye to them.

Tony had also shown him the gravestones, later when Steve had been able to leave his bed. Steve had told Tony their names so they could complete the engraving on the stone. As soon as Tony had left Steve had curled up into a ball next to the stones, screamed, cursed himself for putting them in danger like that, cursed the world, cursed everything. The memory was blurry, because of all the times Steve had tried to forget. It was the worst memory he had.

And he had wanted to die, really, really bad. He had smashed his head on Peggy’s stone, once, twice, three times, until he passed out.

 

He subconsciously lifted his hand and touched the scar right under his hairline. They’d patched him up again. He had survived, barely.

The plush rabbit was all he had left of his family, he didn’t even have a photograph, as they had had to leave in a hurry. Tony had given the rabbit to him at some later point and Steve had kept it in that little drawer ever since.

He figured it was finally time to return it.

The bunker felt like a different place at night, with the lights off and no one running around, without Scott screaming for advice from all corners of the bunker, without Sam shuffling around with the laundry basket in his hands, without the smells of Pietros exotic culinary creations filling up the entire hallway system. Now it was silent, dark and overall quiet. Steve had snuck out before, so he knew his way around. He wouldn’t use the main entrance because that gave off an alarm if opened forcibly or after 10pm. He took a secret door that, hopefully, no one else knew about. He had discovered it about a year ago, while trying to find the root of a computer malfunction, which in the end had been rats, chewing at cables.

The door led him directly to the graveyard. He used it frequently, late at night to have a chat with his family. He felt guilty for never having said goodbye, although it wasn’t his fault, but still. It felt like he needed to redeem himself.

He was only wearing a breathing mask now, he knew that at night the radiation wasn’t as bad so he wouldn’t need protective clothing.

It always hurt.

Seeing their gravestones just made him realize once more, that no matter how alive they once had been, no matter how bright their eyes had shone, no matter how much he had loved them, now they were dust and none of that remained anymore. It was in the past.

And maybe it was time to leave the past behind him. Maybe, just maybe, it was finally time to let go.

“Hey, baby” he said to Sarah’s little stone and sat down “look who I’ve got here”

He held up the rabbit, Sarah had named him Rocket, for whatever reason, and wiggled it around, just as he’d done whenever she had been mad at him and he was trying to cheer her up again. Now he was waving it around in front of an inanimate piece of rock that couldn’t hear him.

“I figured you would want this back, no? I’ve been keeping it for too long, it belongs to you.” A tear began to roll down his cheek and his voice was shaking as he continued to speak. “Baby, I’m so, so sorry. I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you, I…I should have been there for you, for both of you. I miss you so much, baby.”

He placed the rabbit next to Sarah’s stone, into the dirty soil, aware of the fact that sooner or later Rocket would turn into exactly that. Maybe that was a good thing. Wouldn’t they all turn to dust at some point? Wouldn’t the world? Wasn’t it close already?

“Peggy, I…” he began again, well aware that no one could hear him and that he didn’t have to be this hesitant, but he was. He thought about what had happened with Bucky, how… good it had felt, how he could feel himself being drawn to Bucky in a way that confused him. A lot. “I will never stop loving you, you will always be my first love, please never ever forget that, but…things are changing you know? I’ve felt alive again, isn’t that what you always wanted, darling? When you looked into my eyes after work, wouldn’t you say ‘Steve I wish, you would have more life in your eyes, where is the man I fell in love with?’ Wouldn’t you say that, Peggy?”

His voice broke and he sunk further to his knees as he started to sob uncontrollably. It still burned, it still stung, it still hurt. So, so bad. It hurt thinking of her, it hurt, thinking of her voice, of her face.

He put his hand on Peggy’s gravestone and caressed it a few times, until he had calmed down enough to keep talking.

“I’m confused, Peggy” he said “I don’t know what I’m feeling, but I feel like I need to move on, I feel like it’s not worth anything to keep grieving. Please forgive me. I will always love you, Peggy, but I need to move on. You’re dead and I’ve never been able to accept it, in three years. But now I am. Wouldn’t you want me to?”

Silence. Of course.

But who knows.

Maybe ghosts only exist in imagination, maybe they’re a chimera, maybe.

_It’s okay._

Steve lifted his head, the wind had gotten stronger, it was possible he was hearing voices.

He stood up again, pressing a careful kiss first on Peggy’s, then on Sarah’s stone.

“Sleep well, baby. Now you have Rocket, you’re always able to sleep better when you got him, no?”

 

He walked back inside, not seen by anyone, as always and carefully walked back to his room.

On the way he passed Bucky’s room as well, heard him shift around inside, mumbling in his sleep, Steve couldn’t understand what he was saying, but maybe Bucky too, had a few ghosts from his past he would have to say goodbye to, outside, in the wind, where no one else could hear him.

Steve decided not to go in. Even if Bucky was having nightmares, it was best to let him sleep.

Back in his room, he kicked off his shoes and let himself fall straight onto his bed.

He fell asleep with a smile on his face. Tiny, careful. But a smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope y'all liked this little look into Steve's past and I think I'm gonna sprinkle in a few chapters told from his POV in the future, but most will be Bucky's POV.  
> As always leave kudos and comments and tell me what you thought!


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Smut

It was always Steve. Steve when he woke up. Steve when he went to sleep. Steve when he was supposed to focus on something important. Steve here. Steve there. Steve fucking everywhere. It was Bucky’s only thought, like a ghost, multiplying and clogging his every braincell. He thought of that night constantly, like it had been a major turning point in his life. Damn, maybe it was.

They hadn’t spoken a lot since their kiss and then their sudden break. When they did speak it was technical, small talk, nothing that would in any way imply to others what had happened between them. Maybe that was a good thing. If anyone knew, if Mr. Pierce knew…Bucky didn’t want to think of the consequences. He had a feeling that even back in the day, when two men kissing had been a common thing, Mr. Pierce would have been one of those guys who would still fire a guy for being gay. Well, nowadays, being fired, basically meant being sentenced to death.

“What’s with you and Steve?” Scott asked him once, about three days after that night.

“What?” Bucky said and started panicking. _Don’t act suspicious, Barnes, he’ll figure that something happened. Stay calm. Straight face._

“I don’t know, you guys seem so distant. I thought you were close, you know, because Steve found you and stuff” Scott continued.

 _Shitshitshit what the fuck do I say?,_ Bucky thought.

“Yeah no, we are…just, we had a little disagreement the other day and…well,you know, I’m sure it’s nothing. He’s just a little drama queen” Bucky said and added a little chuckle for credibility.

_Nice._

Scott seemed to be okay with that answer and continued to talk about other things, nothing Bucky paid any attention to. He could be glad that Scott didn’t know him so well. If it had been Wanda to ask him this, she would have looked right through him, probably. She had a skill of reading people. It got scary sometimes. Bucky didn’t assume that either of them would tell Mr. Pierce about him and Steve, but he wanted to be sure. It was best if no one found out.

Bucky proceeded to walk to the dining room, to grab some lunch before he went back to work. Walking in he saw Steve sitting at one of the tables across the room. He was with Sam and they seemed to be involved in a very concentrated conversation. Sam’s loud laugh could probably be heard down the whole hallway. Steve looked up as Bucky walked in, Sam noticed and turned his head too, to find out who Steve was staring at. There was a moment of silence, where none of them said anything. Steve’s eyes roamed up and down Bucky’s body, slowly, until his eyes went back up and locked with Bucky’s gaze. What was that in his eyes? Sadness? Longing?

But maybe Bucky was also making things up and this was just his brain, hoping that Steve had been thinking about Bucky just as much as Bucky had been thinking about Steve, but that was unlikely. Steve had, as it seemed that night, not made peace with his past and that was okay. It was normal. Him kissing Bucky had been an impulse, born from loss, confusion, who knew what.

It meant nothing.

Bucky walked over to the large pot on the side of the room, to get some soup. He turned his head once more to see Sam leaning closer to Steve and seemingly asking some sort of question to which Steve slowly shook his head and quietly did some explaining, which Bucky couldn’t hear. He was sure, that they were talking about him.

Bucky already couldn’t stand the silent tension that had been building up in the two minutes since Bucky had walked in, and decided to eat his soup elsewhere. Although Pepper and Tony were in the room as well, and Bucky could’ve sat down at their table, it would be nearly unbearable for him to sit in the same room as Steve, when he was distant like that, when he looked at him, this…silently.  

He gave Steve a last look and a quick nod to Sam and to Tony and Pepper as he walked out and proceeded to walk back to his room. It had been only a very brief moment, but it had felt like everything had happened in slow motion. Which had made the deal a whole lot more uncomfortable than it already was. The entire time he had been in there, no one had said a word, he had just been staring at Steve and then silently gotten his soup and bailed again. God, they probably thought he was on drugs or something. Still better than assuming something about him and Steve.

Steve…there he was again. In Bucky’s head. Clinging to his brain.

He wanted to believe he had seen something in Steve’s eyes, he tried, but the little voice of reason in his head kept telling him that there was nothing, nothing at all.

_He was sad, you both were, your kiss it meant nothing. Even if it felt like there was something, there wasn’t. You’re an idiot for believing there was. You should push him away, distance yourself, for your own good, Barnes, it’s best if you do, it’s best if you get over him._

Bucky tried, but he couldn’t, he knew he wouldn’t be able to. Steve was already distancing himself and, well, Bucky knew that it did not help, it did not help at all. It just made things more difficult, his days longer and his nights more sleepless.

He ate his soup, alone, thinking, always thinking about Steve.

 _Get a grip,_ he tried to tell himself, _get a grip, you’re not a 14 year old girl with a crush. You’re a grown ass man. Have some dignity._

It didn’t work. His mind went back to that night. Steve’s lips on his mouth, his breaths becoming one with Bucky’s, his soft panting as Bucky had bitten down on his bottom lip, the feeling of Steve’s lips on his neck. Heaven. Life. Everything he wished for.

“Fuck…” he quietly said to himself and ruffled his hair with his hands. He really was in deep.

 

***

The clock struck two. Bucky could hear the faint sounds of the little bell down the hallway. His only companion on nights like these. Like an hourly “I’m still here, Bucky, I’m still awake. I’ll stay awake with you, the whole night, if that’s necessary”.

It was kind of reassuring actually.

Throughout the hours he had been laying here on his bed, his mind had wandered back and forth, to home, his parents, his school, then back to Steve, then to his life as… no, not that, he actually managed quite well to shut these intrusive thoughts out. He would feel a little sting in his stomach, a little guilt, a little shame, which sucked, but he managed. Maybe he was too tired to panic again. Then back to Steve, always back to Steve, until…

A knock on the door.

Could it be?

“Yeah?” Bucky said.

The door slowly opened and Steve walked in, in his pyjamas this time. He looked soft.

“I couldn’t sleep” he said, still standing in the doorframe. He looked like a lost child like this.

“Is that why you’re here?” Bucky asked.

“Yeah” Steve said and huffed a laugh “I figured you might be awake too. I heard you’re quite the insomniac. Thought you might like company” He gave Bucky an insecure smile.

Bucky returned his smile and stood up, walking over to Steve.

He closed the door and leaned against it, facing Steve.

“So that’s our thing now?” Bucky asked “You come to my room late at night when you can’t sleep and during the day, you what, ignore me?”

Steve looked at the floor.

“Bucky, I’m…” he began, but Bucky cut him off.

“No, Steve, listen, I can’t do it like this. You can’t just come into my room one night and just…kiss me like that and then expect that I’m not affected by it. You can’t just go on acting like we barely know each other. I know you have troubles with your past, everyone does, but treating me like that, that’s just…cruel”

Bucky hadn’t known how angry he was at Steve, but now it flooded out of him like a waterfall that had been held back by a huge dam.

“I tried to get over it, I tried to tell myself that it meant nothing but I can’t, Steve, I can’t. It’s killing me, thinking that it meant nothing. That it meant nothing _to you_ ”

Bucky hadn’t realized he was crying, but now that the tears were running down his cheeks and coating his lips, he noticed.

“Bucky that’s not…”Steve began and walked closer to Bucky “It meant everything to me, you hear? I just…couldn’t that night. It was too much. And I distanced myself because I thought you would hate me. Because I hurt your feelings.”

“What?” Bucky asked, he was confused, he needed to process. “I could never hate you, Steve, you saved my life. Even if you hated me, I couldn’t. Even if I wanted to. That’s why it hurt so much, these few days. It’s felt like weeks, Steve.”

There was a moment of silence, both of them staring at each other, Bucky’s anger waving off, tears still rolling. Steve looked at him, sad almost, guilty.

“Fuck, Bucky, I’m so sorry“ he said and walked the two more steps left in between them to pull Bucky into a kiss. A kiss more hungry than the last one, more eager, from the beginning. Apologetic.

“I’m so sorry” Steve repeated against Bucky’s lips “I thought you hated me. I really did.”

“I could never. Not when you kiss me like that” Bucky said, already too involved in the kiss to form full sentences. His hands were all over Steve and Steve’s hands were all over him. Steve shoved his hands under Bucky’s dirty shirt and picked him up, their lips still locked as Steve walked them over to Bucky’s bed and dropped Bucky on it, the bed giving off a worried creak as it was not used to carrying the weight of two fully grown men.

Steve climbed on top of Bucky one leg on each side of his waist and started stripping off his shirt, revealing a set of delicious looking abs and a good amount of chest hair that Bucky was eager to run his hands through.

“God, you’re gorgeous” Bucky said and bit his bottom lip.

Steve smirked and proceeded to help Bucky out of his shirt which was carelessly thrown across the room as well as Steve’s.

“Did we lock the door?” Bucky asked.

“Oh shit” Steve said and climbed off of Bucky to quickly run to the door and lock it, with the key that was already stuck in the lock.

In a matter of seconds he was back on top of Bucky pressing kisses all long his chest and torso, careful not to suck too hard on spots where marks would be visible. But down at Bucky’s waistband, where hickeys would be well hid by Bucky’s shirt, god, he really went to work there.

Bucky moaned as Steve’s teeth dug into his skin, glad that the walls were, to some extent, soundproof.

“Fuck me” he gasped. He needed it. He needed to feel that cock of Steve’s that was pressing against his fly, eager to be freed.

Steve slammed their lips back together as he pulled down his pants and underwear in one go, then Bucky’s. God, that cock looked heavenly. Throbbing, at full arousal. Steve kept his gaze locked with Bucky’s while he stuck two of his fingers into his mouth to wet them with saliva. Bucky could only stare, hungrily, needy, his own dick aching with lust. Steve continued kissing Bucky as he slowly inserted his two fingers into Bucky’s hole, drawing a sharp hiss from Bucky’s mouth, from the short little pain.

“You okay?” Steve asked softly, caringly. _God,_ he was so sweet.

“I am, keep going” Bucky answered breathlessly.

Steve started circling his fingers inside Bucky widening his entrance. Bucky groaned and threw his head back.

“Fuck, that feels amazing, Steve, you really do know your- fuck!- way around, don’t you?” Bucky said, panting, his hair sticking to his sweaty forehead.

“Maybe I do” Steve said “But let’s not think about the past, shall we?”

He took his fingers out of Bucky’s hole again, which made him feel empty, like a part of him was missing.

Almost without warning, Steve’s cock was inside him and Bucky let out a loud moan, falling down on his back, Steve kneeling on top of him.

“Feel good?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’m okay” Bucky said smiling. He was, really. Despite past experiences, he was. This was so much different “Kiss me”

Steve leaned down to embrace Bucky in a kiss, while he started thrusting his length in and out of Bucky with his lower half. Their skin was practically touching at every possible spot now, Steve covered Bucky almost completely, holding him in his arms as he kept fucking into him, carefully, not to eagerly. It was sweet, it felt like home, it felt safe.

Soft moans escaped Bucky’s mouth, mixing with the pants from Steve. They didn’t talk much, they didn’t need to. Steve kept looking at Bucky with the utmost admiration in his eyes, like he had found something he had lost long ago.

“God, you’re so beautiful, Bucky, I’m so sorry for ever pushing you away” Steve said, his voice almost breaking

“It’s okay, …it’s okay” Bucky said and caressed Steve’s cheek, smiling reassuringly “It’s not your fault.”

Steve smiled back and closed the distance between their mouths again, softly poking his tongue against Bucky’s, which made him laugh. Bucky could feel his sweat mixing with Steve’s, it felt like their bodies were becoming one, like there was nothing in the world but the two of them and that nothing could hurt them. They were moving in complete sync now, their bodies fitting into each other like the last two pieces of a puzzle.

Bucky could feel his orgasm approaching slowly, calmly, without hurry, like a wanderer spotting his destination in the distance after walking for days and hours.

By the speed of Steve’s pants he could feel that he was close too.

“I want you to look at me” Bucky said and held Steve’s head between his hands. And Steve did, he looked at him with…love, yes, it was love, from the depths of his soul.

And then the wanderer finally arrived at his house. Bucky felt like a million fireworks went off inside of him as he came all over his torso, Steve’s name on his lips, a breathless whisper as he moaned through his orgasm, all the while still rocking his body in sync with Steve’s.

And then Steve came too, deep inside of Bucky, and the sound he made while his orgasm shook up his entire body, was just…divine. He buried his face in the crook of Bucky’s neck and groaned against it, as he released himself. Bucky holding him close, as he did.

They kept laying like that for a couple of seconds, panting, breathing in each other’s scent, before Steve finally pulled out.

“You were amazing” Steve said and cupped Bucky’s cheek, smiling at him.

“We were both amazing. This…was amazing” Bucky said and pulled Steve’s smile on his own, kissing him tiredly. They stayed like this for a while, softly making out, no talking, no unnecessary words.

Steve rolled off of Bucky and for a second Bucky was worried he might get up and leave, but instead he pulled the covers over both of them and closed his arms around Bucky from behind, resting his head on Bucky’s shoulder.

“I love you” Steve mumbled, against Bucky’s still sweaty skin.

“Do you mean that?” Bucky asked, unsure if Steve was just tired and already no more aware of what he said.

He didn’t get an answer. Steve’s breathing had already gone even, he was asleep.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YEET u guys i feel like this chapter was rly badly written but uh yeah leave feedback still. Thank you!!


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Loss, Mentions of Death, Fire  
> (Also: Incredibly fucking bad writing i'm so sorry omfg)

There was a soothing feeling on Bucky’s face. Half caught up in ugly dreams about his past he didn’t notice what it was or where it was coming from, but it slowly but surely scared away the ugly faces that followed him. He felt like he was lifted on a cloud, on a merciful lift, that dragged him out of the hellish abyss of his dreamscape and back into reality. It was Steve’s hand, more so the tips of his fingers that were softly and repeatedly stroking along Bucky’s face, starting at his left temple, over his entire forehead, down the sides of his face and stopping below his bottom lip. Then back at his left temple, over and over again. Bucky opened his eyes, only to face the same darkness he saw with closed eyes for a few seconds before his eyes started to get used to the darkness. He turned his head to look at Steve who laid next to him, propped up on one elbow and looking down at Bucky. Steve stopped tracing his fingers when he noticed that Bucky was awake and gave him a soft smile, almost invisible in the dark of the room.

“You were talking in your sleep” Steve said, his voice still husky.

“Oh” Bucky replied.

He reached out with one hand to caress Steve’s arm, the one he’d used to wake him up. “I’m sorry. I can’t help it.” he said and sighed “Whatever it was that I said, it has nothing to do with you.” For the next few words he said he, as well, propped himself up on one arm to be able to look into Steve’s face better, his eyes most importantly, even though he could still only little of Steve in the dark room. “I loved sleeping with you. My past isn’t your fault. I absolutely loved every second of sleeping with you and no bad dream can change that.” He reached out to cup Steve’s jaw with his hands, to trace the side of his face only to feel wetness on Steve’s cheek. Tears. He used his thumb to wipe them away, then leaned forward to press his lips onto the path the tears had taken down Steve’s face. “Thanks for waking me up” Bucky whispered “Where did you learn to do that?”

He could hear Steve taking a deep, shaky breath.

“My mom. She used to do that when I couldn’t sleep or when I had a bad dream. It worked with Sarah too. My little girl, she…” Steve stopped for a second to take another breath “…she used to have bad dreams as well. And well, that worked. We all used to have bad dreams. What else are you supposed to dream about in a world that is an absolute nightmare in reality too?” Steve huffed a bitter laugh. “I taught it Peggy too. She would start doing it the same way, when I couldn’t sleep. When I was too tired to do anything else, but lay in bed, but still couldn’t sleep, because my brain was still hammering. Resonating from the noise of the big machines in the factory.” He paused his monologue to think for a second “I think I asked too much of her”

Bucky had laid down on his own arm, angled in order to work as a pillow and looked at Steve.

“Tell me about her” he said “About Peggy”

Steve huffed a soft chuckle as if reminiscing in memories from a better time than the current one.

“Well...” he began, seeming like he didn’t quite know where to start “She was the strongest woman I ever knew. Always had her own will, never surrendered, not even to the reaper when he was knocking at the door.”

“What do you mean?” Bucky asked.

Steve smiled and started caressing Bucky’s arm, up and down, up and down, before he continued to speak. “When she gave birth to Sarah, well, you can imagine that it didn’t happen in a very safe and sanitary environment. The only help we got was from our neighbour, Mr. Phillips, who had delivered babies before, but was in no way a licensed professional. Peggy almost died, because she lost a lot of blood. She passed out for a while, after Sarah had arrived” Steve smiled at the memory “That little girl, crying, covered in blood. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.” He paused again for a few seconds “Well, Peggy, we thought we lost her, but she opened her eyes again after some time. Like she had been too stubborn to simply just go like that. Like I said, like the reaper was knocking at her door, but she didn’t want to open it.”

While he had been speaking, Steve’s hand had left Bucky’s arm and was now playing with each of Bucky’s fingers, running up and down each finger, from the top of his fingerprint to the spot where his fingers joined.

Bucky didn’t say anything for a few moments.

“She sounds like an amazing woman” he said and immediately realized how fucking stupid that sounded.

“She was.” Steve said “I was never good enough for her, I didn’t deserve her and she didn’t deserve anything that I weighed on her. You see, I worked in the factory for ten hours or more a day. Had to do heavy lifting, the entire day. It was loud, it was dirty, it was awful. I was stressed when I came home. Tired. I was always so drained. I felt awful for her and about myself for not being able to do anything around the house. I would just…sit there, with Sarah sleeping on my chest, because that was the only place she’d be able to fall asleep as a baby. But Peggy never complained. Never.”

Bucky again, stayed silent. He figured it was no use to try to lift Steve up, to tell him that he shouldn’t feel guilty, because after all, that was all in the past and behind an impenetrable wall of memories. They were talking about a dead person. But Bucky was glad that Steve was willing to open up now, like Bucky had been able to tear down at least some of the walls Steve had put up around him.

“How did they die?” Bucky asked. Peggy, who was too stubborn to die and Sarah, the baby who could only fall asleep on her father’s broad, warm chest.

“Radiation” Steve said shortly, like it was something that hurt with every word, when you talked about it. Every word a little knife that stings your heart and breaks it in two, if you’re not careful. “We had to leave the city, because it was burning, our house too. I thought we’d make it to the bunker. Well, I did. They did not.”

Silence.

Bucky figured that Steve wouldn’t say anymore on the matter. A few seconds later, Steve had, to Bucky’s surprise, positioned himself on top of Bucky again, tiredly but also like he needed something to hold on to. He kissed Bucky, tenderly and Bucky could feel new salty wetness on his lips and deepened the kiss to do his best to stop Steve from crying. “Please don’t think you’re a replacement” Steve now said with his voice breaking. “After I lost Peggy I didn’t think I could feel the same about someone again, I thought I’d never feel happiness again. You proved me wrong.”

 

***

In the morning, when he woke up, Bucky was alone. He hadn’t noticed Steve leaving which had to mean that after their talk last night, Bucky had fallen back into a deep and dreamless sleep. It was probably best that Steve had left before anyone else was up and roaming around outside Bucky’s room. Steve had stayed with him as long as he could, but in this world, waking up next to one another, with the sunlight grazing through tall windows, like in the old movies, just wasn’t an option.

Bucky was still naked and looked down at himself, noticing the deep red and purple marks Steve’s teeth had left at and around his hipbones. These would be visible for at least two weeks, he estimated. Bucky just hoped eagerly that in these two weeks no scenario, that involved more people than just him and Steve, in which he would be required to take off his shirt, would occur.

He only saw Steve once that day, during the meeting, where they sat next to each other, Steve repeatedly playfully nudging Bucky’s foot with his own, making Bucky grin and Mr. Pierce ask multiple times if everything was alright. After that they stopped. Mr. Pierce asked Steve to take care of the power supply systems that were on another level of the bunker than the one Bucky was working in today. The task was a complicated one so Bucky also assumed that it would take all day and that he wouldn’t really get to see Steve around. It made Bucky sad, one half of him, the other half was grateful, because in a way Bucky did not know how to act around Steve now, when other people were with them. He had almost freaked out the other day about Scott asking him about their relationship and he wouldn’t know how to believably lie and conceal the fact that they slept with each other, if Steve was there too.

“Be careful” was the only thing Bucky said to him before Steve took the stairs down. “I’ll try my best” Steve said and gave him a smug smile which at the same time said “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine”

Bucky knew that the power supply area was a delicate area, working there required precision, because if anything malfunctioned even slightly… well, there were a lot of things that could go wrong. But Steve had been down there before and he had been fine.

Bucky tried not to think about it and went to work himself. He and Wanda had been assigned to fix a leaking waterpipe, that had cut off the water supply in the corner of the bunker where Tony, Pepper, Sam and Scott lived, something that wasn’t too hard to do and also not that dangerous.

“Did you hear?” Wanda said to him as they were walking the short way to the broken waterpipe “Pepper’s baby. It’s gonna be a boy.”

“Oh, really?” Bucky said, not sure why it mattered which gender the baby was, as none of them would ever really get to know him.

Wanda nodded, seemingly also realizing that it in fact, didn’t really matter and that they were just trying to conceal that and the fact that they were living in a very, very sad world, by having shallow small talk. A desperate attempt at pretending that the world wasn’t the way it was.

“I hope he makes it” Wanda said and with that, the conversation was over.

The pipe was a quick fix. They were done within an hour and went back to the living area chatting about more cheerful things than before. About Pietro’s newest recipe for example. Bucky didn’t know where he took the inspiration from. He rarely ended up cooking the things he thought up, because he didn’t have the ingredients at his disposal, but every once in a blue moon he got permission from Mr. Pierce to walk to the market to get what he needed and then he’d cook up a true feast. Those were the happiest nights Bucky had experienced at the bunker.

Later that day, Bucky was sitting in the library, reading a very old book, something called _The Lord of the Rings,_ which, as Wanda had told him, had been very popular in the last century and the one before that.

A piercing alarm, ripped Bucky from the story he had before drowned himself in, like he could just dive into another universe in his head and never return. Bucky jumped up, adrenalin rushing through him, from the shock of the sudden loud noise. A second later the lights went out and the red emergency power supply lamps went on.

Oh no.

Something had gone wrong with the power supply. And Steve was down there. Bucky ran into the corridor, where he found Sam and Pepper as well who were searching what had caused the alarm. Bucky ran forward to the door to the stairs where he had just this morning told Steve to be careful. Smoke was already creeping through beneath the door.

“Oh, fuck” he could hear Sam say behind him. Pepper had run into the other direction to look for help. Slowly but surely more people came to the door. And realized what happened. Wanda closed her hands in front of her mouth as she saw the smoke.

“I have to go down there!” Bucky said, his voice shaky, his heart racing, knowing that, even if he made it out he would make it out severely injured, turning to Sam who was still standing behind him “Steve is still down there. We can’t just leave him.”

“If something exploded down there, he’s probably already dead” Sam said, his voice monotone, like this had happened to him before. Bucky looked at the floor, closing his fist, his fingernails painfully digging into his skin, knowing that with every passing second the chances that Steve was still alive became smaller. And smaller. And smaller.

It couldn’t be. Steve couldn’t be dead. He’d only just seen him this morning, cheerful, his face beautiful and clean like always. His hair in perfect shape, like always. He didn’t want to imagine his face, his body, now. Covered in burns, flames eating away at him.

“We don’t know that” Bucky said quietly, trying very hard not to start shouting.

“Bucky, that’s suicide” Sam said. He was the only one still standing there. Everyone else had gone, probably as far away from the fire as possible. “The door and the walls are fireproof. The fire will burn out. We’ll give him a respective funeral.”

“No!” Bucky shouted. He didn’t want to think of Steve’s tombstone next to the others outside in that clearing. Slowly getting eaten away by the rain, soon to be forgotten.

He opened the door and went in. He could hear Sam shouting his name and an incomprehensible curse, before the door fell shut.

Bucky had never before felt such heat. It was like he’d fallen into the sun. Like this was actual hell. The steps of the stairs seemed to be fireproof too as they weren’t on fire. Bucky’s eyes stung like hell from the smoke that was all around him and made him cough. He really hadn’t thought this through.

But there was no going back now. He walked down the stairs, the unbearable heat getting even stronger with every step he took. “Steve!” he shouted. He knew that Steve was probably passed out if not completely dead and wouldn’t hear him. No, he wasn’t dead. Bucky didn’t want that, it couldn’t happen. Not Steve. Not the Steve whose tears he had kissed off of his lips just last night. No. No. No.

Bucky’s vision was heavily impaired by the smoke. He didn’t know what had happened down here, he just knew that everything was on fire.

He eagerly tried to clear his sight from the smoke, tried to hold his breath as long as he could so he wouldn’t inhale a lot of smoke. The breaths that he did take were short and ended up in him almost coughing his lungs out. But he didn’t stop.

Then finally, he saw a silhouette on the floor.

“Fuck, Steve!” Bucky shouted inhaling another big portion of smoke and ended up coughing, while he dropped down next to Steve. He had passed out, but after Bucky had held his hand under his thick clothing and put it on his bare chest for a few seconds, he felt a heartbeat. Slow. Unsure. But a heartbeat. Bucky huffed a relieved laugh. “I knew you’d make it”

Bucky felt weak, but he picked Steve up, he didn’t know how, but he managed. He managed to get back to the stairs and he even managed to walk up the stairs.

He managed to save Steve. He managed to put him down at the top of the stairs, outside the door.

But he didn’t manage to see or walk straight after he had put down Steve. _Thank god he’s safe, thank god he’s safe,_ was the only thought going through his head. Not _Careful, Bucky there are stairs behind you_ or _Better sit down, Bucky, or you’ll fall down the stairs, Bucky._ None of that went through his smoke clouded brain, before he took one thoughtless step backwards too much and tripped over the top of the stairs, falling back down into the flaming inferno that he had just come out of. The heat engulfed him once again, like a merciless rope that closes around your neck. Just when you think you almost got it off, you trip and fall into its grip even more. He managed to think _Fuck_ as he fell down the stairs, feeling his bones breaking on the hard metal that the stairs were made out of.

He managed to think _At least it’s me and not him_ as the flames began to eat away at his arm and he realized there was nothing he could do about it. Then everything went dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i feel like this is the worst fucking chapter so far. i had a draft of this but deleted it bc it was just that bad, this version was a bit better i guess???? but still bad. if you should, by some miracle, think otherwise pls lemme know, leave kudos n comments xoxo


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Graphic descriptions of crippled bodyparts

It was weird. Like he wasn’t sure whether he was alive or not. Like he existed only in his head and not outside of it. It felt like the outside world had been deleted and only he was left. Maybe this was, what being dead was like? _No_ , Bucky thought, gaining more and more control over his thoughts and his headspace. _I’m still here,_ he thought. Still, he saw nothing but blackness and felt incapable of opening his eyes. Unwilling to. He felt comfortable like this, like he was swaying on top of soft waves into an ocean of feeling safe, feeling like he was home. It was weird. It felt like a soft breeze was ghosting over his face, yet there was no wind. He felt like his one side was heavier than the other, but his hands both felt empty. In fact, his entire left side, felt unusually light. And he felt a weight in his other hand. A firm grip. Almost firm enough to be able to break his fingers, but at the same time so tender.

Those were the first two things Bucky noticed when he woke up. That something was off with his left arm and that someone was holding his hand. And the breeze on his face? That wasn’t the wind. Someone was caressing his face as well, softly, soothingly, not sure if to sooth Bucky or themself.

Bucky had trouble opening his eyes, cause they had been closed for too long, but eventually managed to break his eyelashes apart to gaze out into the world again, after a week of being asleep.

The first thing he noticed were his legs under the white sheets of yet another hospital bed, they felt heavy and as Bucky was trying to move them a sharp pain shot through his leg and made him hiss lowly. That hiss finally made Steve, who was sitting on a chair next to the bed and had been looking at the floor before finally notice that Bucky had woken up.

He looked at Bucky and for a moment he didn’t say anything or move at all, while he and Bucky just looked at each other, like Steve needed to evaluate if he was dreaming or not. His eyes were swollen and red, like he had cried not long ago. The bags under his eyes had gotten darker, deeper and his hair didn’t look as well-groomed as usual. But at the same time, it was the most beautiful thing Bucky had ever seen. This meant he wasn’t dead and it also meant Steve wasn’t dead. Now Bucky started to recall. The fire. His suicide mission to save Steve, and his victory at that. Him falling down the stairs, he remembered that too and he remembered praying that Steve would make it. He felt a smile involuntarily creep up his face as he kept looking at the other.

“You made it” Bucky said, his voice as raspy as could be. His throat was still sore from all the smoke he’d inhaled.

“Oh, Bucky” Steve said and leaned over, grabbing Bucky’s face in his hands as tenderly as possible for a man with hands like Steve’s, and pressed his lips on Bucky’s, like he was a sailor that had been on sea for weeks and Bucky’s lips were the islands glooming in the distance. While Steve was still kissing him, Bucky could feel how violent sobs started to shake Steve and how tears were beginning to roll down his face, but he kept kissing Bucky, breathlessly smiling against his lips until he was out of breath and broke apart. Those tears he was crying were tears of joy as it seemed, as he was smiling like a dumbass all the while he kept sobbing and touching Bucky’s face, like he had to make sure that he was really there, that he had actually made it.

“What the fuck were you thinking?” Steve said in between sobs, his voice shaky. Now his smile faded and something entered his face. An emotion so deep, so profound, but so…damaged, that Bucky almost had to look away.

“You should have left me down there! You should have listened to Sam, you…” he stopped because his voice had broken completely, more sobs shook him up, while he sunk back into the position he had been in before Bucky had woken up. Now he was crying for real. But why, Bucky was alive wasn’t he?

Steve looked up again, his eyes redder than before, the hurt still in his eyes, that terrible, terrible mix of guilt and sadness and regret that you can only find on the face of a profoundly broken man. But weren’t they both?

“Your arm, Bucky” Steve said and took another breath to continue, but after a look at Bucky’s left side, the side Bucky had paid little to no attention to up until this point, he broke off again, more sobs shaking him.

 _Stop, stop, make it stop!,_ Bucky thought as he saw Steve breaking apart like that. With every sob that rocked him, Bucky was afraid the fragile seams with which Steve seemed to have stitched up his broken soul, would rip apart.

Bucky looked at his arm now.

Or better, lack thereof.

The sight in front of his eyes almost made him gag, he felt dizzy, he felt nothing at all and everything at the same time.

Before he had thought something was just off with his arm, like his nerves had shut off for a moment and would shoot back up in a minute but no.

At the spot of his shoulder where his arm had formerly grown out of, there now was nothing. Not even a stump. His shoulder ended in a huge ugly scar, but that was it.

Bucky was disgusted at himself.

He looked away, he was unable to look at himself like this. He looked back at Steve instead, who still had so much sorrow, so much pain in his eyes, that Bucky almost immediately forgot about his arm again and just wanted to wipe that heartbreaking expression off of his face.

“It’s on me” Steve said and Bucky wanted to raise his voice to disagree, but Steve kept talking before Bucky could say anything “If you hadn’t gone down there, you would not be crippled. I’m so, so sorry”

Those were the only words he said. He now sat calmly, not looking at Bucky, but at the floor. Silent tears were now running down his cheeks and into his beard, where the dark blonde hairs caught them, each giving off a tiny light reflex as they landed.

“I’m sorry, Bucky, I just…I just can’t right now”

And with that he stood up and walked out, not looking back at Bucky another time, closing the door behind him.

“Steve!” Bucky managed to shout weakly. But Steve was already gone or didn’t want to come back.

 _You’re hideous,_ the little evil voice in Bucky’s head said and cackled, _he walked out on you, because you’re hideous. No one will want to look at you ever. Again. Not even that man you love so much. He’s disgusted when he looks at you. As he should be._

Bucky tried not to listen, he tried not to cry, but he failed. Had he not been to weak to, he would’ve tried to kill himself right then and there. But he didn’t. Instead he just sat in silence, listening to the evil voice in his head. He knew the voice lied, he had felt that Steve’s kiss had been profound. That Steve felt the same way about him, that Bucky felt about Steve. He tried to tell himself that, until he almost believed it.

During the rest of the day, more people came to visit. Frankly everyone who lived in the bunker. Sam sat with him for the longest time. He had been the one to get Bucky out. Just with a better equipment. He wasn’t mad, though. He asked if Bucky was okay, if he felt weird without his arm.

Yes, yes, he did. It still felt like it wasn’t real, like all of that never happened and that he would wake up again, with two arms. But he wouldn’t wake up. He was awake.

“Steve really does mean a lot to you, huh?” Sam asked, while looking at the pictures on the wall. Old impressionist paintings, full of colours that didn’t exist anymore.

Bucky didn’t know how to respond exactly. He knew he could probably trust Sam, but he could never be sure.

“You know what, don’t answer that. I know that he does. More than someone usually means.” He chuckled. Bucky was perplexed.

“How did you…?” Bucky asked.

Sam huffed a laugh.

“Please. The way you were willing to barge into that flaming room, just like that, without no protection?” he said and gave a smile to Bucky “That ain’t just happening out of pure moral courage, buddy”

Bucky, who had had no idea that he had been clenching his shoulders before, unclenched and sunk back into the stack of pillows Wanda had put into his back earlier, when she had visited.

“Don’t worry. I won’t go snitching to Mr. Pierce. I hate that man with all my being. And I know the kind of situation you’re in.”

Bucky looked at him, confusedly.

Sam chuckled again.

“You wouldn’t dare to assume, how many men are loving other men and how many women are loving other women in this world, Bucky.”

“You lost someone too?” Bucky asked, turning his body to the side a little, sending multiple shots of pain through his system, but he didn’t care, he wanted to look at Sam properly.

“Sure did. His name is Rhodey.”

“Is?” Bucky asked. When talking about losing someone he would usually expect past tense.

“Well, fuck, I don’t know. Maybe he’s dead too. I lost him on the way here. Took some sort of random turn that he didn’t and poof” Sam paused for a second “he was gone. And I didn’t find him. I can only hope that he found his way to some other bunker.”

All the while he had told his story, he had looked at the floor, but now he was looking at Bucky again.

“See? Now we both know a secret about each other.”

“Does Steve know?” Bucky asked.

“Sure he does. He was the first and only one in here that I ever told up until now.” Sam replied and chuckled again.

“I’m so sorry” Bucky said, aware that that wasn’t and would never be enough.

“Thanks, Bucky.” Sam said and looked at him. After a pause of a few seconds he said: “God, you really do look like shit.”

Bucky laughed, for what felt like the first time in forever.

He had not expected Sam to open up like that, but he was glad that he did. He now knew that he could trust him.

“Don’t think Steve won’t want you anymore.” Sam said “He hasn’t told me about you two, but I know that when he loves, he loves you whole. No matter if you’re missing an arm or not. He just feels guilty”

“Thank you Sam” Bucky said and smiled at him.

He had looked into a mirror earlier and it hadn’t been nice. Parts of his face were burned too, scars that would never go away. But it could have been worse. He had been informed that, except for his arm, which had been damaged by the flames so severely that they had had to amputate it, his body was mostly intact. Mr. Pierce had been there. Telling him he was still able to father children. Bastard.

“I better go” Sam said and stood up, taking his jacket from the back of the chair on which he had been sitting. “There’s someone else who you should meet”

Bucky was confused. Everyone had been there, so who was this mysterious person he was supposed to meet.

Behind Sam, a blonde, tall woman entered the room. She was beautiful and Bucky didn’t know her. _She must be new_ , he thought. She looked so fierce, way stronger than Bucky had ever felt in his entire life.

“Hi” she said and extended a hand “I’m Carol”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In conclusion: I love Sam Wilson.  
> Hope y'all liked this hizzUK


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Crippled body parts, Hospitals, mentions of loss

Carol, as it turned out, had arrived four days after Bucky’s fateful fall down the stairs. Other than Bucky, she had managed to find the bunker all on her own. At least that’s what she had told Bucky. She was kind to him, brought him his food often, while he was still bound to his bed and wasn’t allowed to move and sat with him, talking about whatever and whoever while everyone else was busy doing something else. Bucky told her about life in the bunker, about his life before this, while leaving out a few details. And in return she told him about her life, about the people she had known, about the places she had visited, all that. Bucky was very grateful for her taking the time to talk with him as much as she did, as he would’ve probably gone crazy, sitting alone in his hospital room, with nothing to look at, but the wall and the ugly scar on his shoulder that still made him want to throw up, whenever it entered his field of vision.

He was afraid, because of the arm. Afraid that he’d get kicked out, as soon as he was healthy enough to leave his bed. Because he was useless without the arm.

But the thing he was afraid of wasn’t dying. He realized after some time that his will to live for himself had been lost a while ago. No, he didn’t want to leave Steve behind. Even if Steve wouldn’t want to look at him anymore because of his arm, Bucky wouldn’t be able to bear leaving him behind. Steve who had shown him emotions Bucky had not known he was capable of. Steve who had made him feel alive, when he had almost forgotten what that really felt like.

In a world like this, it was unusual to feel these sorts of emotions, it didn’t fit, cause the world was slowly dying. Why would anyone want to love in that environment? But it turned out that people still did. He and Steve did, Steve and Peggy had, Tony and Pepper did, Nat and Bruce did, Sam and Rhodey had. Love, an allegedly extinct emotion, still existed. Would probably exist until the last humans had died out.

 It was quite comforting actually, Bucky thought in the quiet of his hospital room, just the monotonous beeping of the heart rate monitor, underlining his thoughts.

He heard a quiet knock on the door.

“Come in” he said with his still raspy voice. His air tube had still not fully recovered from being penetrated by the amounts of smoke that Bucky had inhaled.

Steve poked his head through the door and looked at him. It sent Bucky back to his first (conscious) morning here, when Steve had woken him up and they had had their little flirtation. Compared to now, things had seemed so easy then.

“Hi” Steve said softly “Can I sit down with you for a moment?”

Bucky scoffed “Why is that even a question? Of course you can.” The scoff had been a stupid move as it resulted in him breaking out into another tirade of coughs that didn’t help much in the attempt to let his throat recover from the damage Bucky had inflicted upon it. Steve smiled and walked the two steps over to the chair next to Bucky’s bed where he had also been sitting when Bucky had woken up a few days ago.

“How are you feeling, Bucky?” Steve asked, concern in his voice. But also something else. Something like guilt. Was Steve still blaming himself for Bucky’s own stupidity?

“I’m better. On the road to recovery.” Bucky said and tried to give Steve a reassuring smile, but he felt like it didn’t really work.

“Bucky, I am so, so sorry” Steve said after a couple seconds of silence.

Bucky leaned his head back into his pillows in frustration. Why was he sorry? It wasn’t his fault that the electricity system had had a malfunction and it also wasn’t his fault, that Bucky had been stupid enough to think that he could rescue Steve and make it out fine, too.

“For what?” Bucky asked, although he knew for what.

“You know exactly for what” Steve said and gave him an annoyed look.

“Steve” Bucky said and leaned forward grabbing Steve’s hand with the one arm that he still had “none of what my stupidity made me do is your fault. I could’ve chosen to leave you down there. I could have chosen to get a gas mask. You hear? Me! I made these choices. And they’re not your fault. All I care about is that you made it out alive” He cupped Steve’s cheek and used his thumb to catch the tears that had begun to roll from Steve’s eyes once again. “That’s all that matters”

Steve smiled and turned his face to kiss Bucky’s palm. The feeling of Steve’s scruffy beard against his skin was very reassuring to Bucky. He wanted to only live in this moment, forever. If he had been given the opportunity to stop time only once in his entire life, he would have chosen this. He closed his eyes and smiled, when suddenly Steve’s always so incredibly soft lips were on his own, dried out lips again and licked across them in an attempt to gain entrance, which Bucky gladly granted. Steve’s arm closed around Bucky’s waist and pulled him closer, Bucky grunting a little as there were some bruises on his back that Steve was touching now.

“Oh, Fuck, are you okay?” Steve said and pulled away as he felt Bucky’s short moment of discomfort.

“Shut up and kiss me” Bucky said smiling and closed the distance between their mouths again, smiling against Steve’s lips. In another day and age they could’ve been like this all the time. Just two human beings madly in love with each other. Spending each moment together, waking up every morning to a world that was still living and willing to give a home to the love that was produced in it. Bucky imagined it as he was kissing Steve. Imagined that the circumstances were different. He closed his arm around Steve’s neck and pulled him closer, resulting in Steve giggling lowly into his mouth. In the end, they would always be teenagers in love. No matter how ugly things got.

Steve felt like home. Bucky had established that feeling by now. The illusion that everything was alright, while nothing was actually alright. Steve was his one and only, he knew that now and he realized it once again now as he was kissing him, as hungrily and enthusiastically as he had done, when Bucky had had two arms.

Bucky poked his tongue against Steve’s and made him chuckle into the kiss once again only to pull away a few seconds later to lean their heads together to look into Bucky’s eyes, breathless and smiling stupidly. He huffed a disbelieving laugh “I think I love you, Bucky Barnes” Steve said and while he said it he looked the happiest Bucky had ever seen him look “I really do”

Bucky smiled, a sincere smile, one of those smiles you can’t hold back, one of those smiles that come from the depths of your soul and make you feel all dizzy inside from all the happiness they inflict.

“ I love you,too, Steve Rogers” he said “I think I have for quite some time now”

Steve didn’t say anything, just widened his grin and kissed Bucky again, tenderly softly, while using one hand to carefully caress Bucky’s shoulder, the shoulder where an arm was missing. It made Bucky feel all giddy inside.

If he hadn’t been so caught up in the divine feeling of loving and being loved in return, had they both not been in an absolute delirium resulting from the electrifying effect that their kiss had upon them, they would probably have heard the steps that were approaching outside the door. They could’ve been heard from very far as the hallway leading to this room was quite long. But they didn’t. They only heard the surprised “Oh, sorry” that came from behind them, when it was already too late to hide.

Bucky jumped, pulling away quickly and shooting his head around, as well as Steve, to look at who had entered the room. It was Carol, who was holding a glass of orange juice in one, and one of Pietro’s special muffins in her other hand. She hadn’t knocked, that was a habit of hers as Bucky had found out over the course of the past few days.

She chuckled at their terrified expressions and closed the door behind her.

“Don’t worry” she said and pulled another chair next to Steve’s to sit down. She put the orange juice and the muffin on the small table next to Bucky’s bed “I won’t tell anyone”

Bucky was still perplexed, as well as Steve, as he didn’t say anything either, just stared at her in shock. Why did she make such a small deal out of it?

“Did you fellas see a ghost or something?” she said and laughed again “Seriously, you look spooked. Sorry for scaring you. That’s for you by the way” She said and gestured first to Bucky then to the food items she had brought.

Slowly finding his ability to move again, Bucky reached for the glass and took a sip.

“Thank you” he said simply and put it down again.

Steve looked confused, still, and a little bit angry.

“You could’ve knocked, you know?” he said.

“Yeah, Sorry, I’m not really used to knocking. I really gotta work on that” she said, true apology in her voice.

“You saw nothing” Steve said “Ok? No matter who you’re talking to, no matter how much you trust them. This” he gestured first to himself, then to Bucky “has to remain a secret. If Mr. Pierce  finds out…we’re fucked”

Carol nodded and put a reassuring hand on Steve’s arm “You have my word. Both of you. I would never want anyone to get kicked out of the only place where there’s a chance of survival. And besides” she took a small break as if she was conflicted with herself whether she should keep talking or not , “I know what it feels like to get kicked out, because you love who you love.”

Bucky took a second to process what she had just confessed to him, after like a week of knowing him.

“Wait….” Bucky said “Fuck, that’s awful, I’m so sorry”

She smiled, but it wasn’t a very happy smile. “Don’t be” she said “None of us can change anything about it now” She looked off into the distance, or rather stared emptily at the wall.

“What was her name?” Steve now asked. Looking off into the distance, as if remembering something dear to her, she smiled again, looked at the floor and then back at Steve with a single tear rolling down her cheek.

“Brunnhilde. That was her name. Most amazing and beautiful woman I’ve ever met. She really was. Jesus…” she said and broke off, as more tears fell down her cheeks. She huffed a teary laugh. “You know I was having a good day, compared to others. But now…now I’m thinking about this again and…god, I just hate this world so much”

Steve extended a hand and put it on Carols shoulder, squeezing it in order to offer her comfort. “I’m so sorry” he said, and it sounded like he genuinely meant it. This was another thing Bucky loved about him. You could feel when he was being honest about something and he was almost always honest. He always said what he also meant and that was a trait Bucky hugely admired. “Where is she now?” he asked.

“Still back at that bunker, I guess” Carol said and sniffed sharply once, as if to signal that she was done crying. “They wouldn’t let us leave together”

“I’m sure you’ll see each other again” Bucky said and tried to give a reassuring smile to her. He had only known Carol for a week or so, but she had always seemed so strong, so resilient and she always seemed to be in a good mood. But he needed to remember that people put on happy faces to conceal their inner darkness sometimes. Seeing her this vulnerable was new. But he didn’t mind. He was glad she’d opened up, it made him feel like he wasn’t alone. Like his and Steve’s secrets was safe in her hands.

There they were now, knowing about each other’s secrets, all of them afraid of thinking about the past, three little humans sitting in a hospital room together, while the world is ending around them.

“If we stick together, we can make it through okay” she now said and erupted in a big smile again “We’re gonna be a good team”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i feel like this is so????? bad idk idk you guys


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Burn Scars, Smut

_One and a half weeks later_

“Come on, Buck, I wanna show you something”

“What is it?” Bucky asked and looked at Steve, who had just barged into his room without knocking or anything, confusedly. But all he got from Steve was a sheepish grin that felt so unusual because of Steve’s usually quite stern behaviour.

“No telling. It’s a surprise” Steve said and extended his hand.

Bucky took it and allowed Steve to pull him up from his bed, his normal bed, not the hospital bed.

“I hate surprises” he muttered, but that was only partially true. If the surprise involved Steve grinning this sheepishly, which was absolutely adorable, he liked it.

“Not this one, you’ll love it” he said “Come on”

Steve dragged Bucky across the room, but let go of his hands as soon as they entered the hallway. For safety.

Bucky had been allowed to leave his hospital bed about three days ago and had only then gotten to experience the full troubles of living with only one arm. He would have either Carol or Wanda assist him with putting his hair into a bun each morning. He had always tied his hair up himself, but now that Wanda and Carol had taken over control of his hair, his buns looked a lot less messy. At least one little thing that was good about this. But still, he would rather have a messy bun, than only one arm. Eating became more exhausting too. Bucky figured that soup would become his favourite food because you only need one piece of cutlery to eat it. And he felt awkward having to ask someone else to cut his food for him, even though everyone would have probably understood. Still, he didn’t want to be seen as a crippled person, who could do nothing by himself.

Steve was right now dragging Bucky straight to his room, pulled them inside and closed the door behind him. This was the first time Bucky had ever been in Steve’s room and he immediately realized that it had a lot more character than Bucky’s did. Bucky’s room was small, there wasn’t a lot of space for furniture, but he figured he might be able to at least hang up a picture or two in the future. Steve’s walls were filled with drawings of all sorts of things. People, houses, animals. Mostly impressions from Steve’s hometown, Bucky assumed. There was one repetitive motive though. A woman and a little girl. Sometimes they were single portraits, sometimes they were together. He noticed one drawing that showed them both with Steve. The ink with which it had been drawn, was smudged, like water had repetitively fallen on it. Or tears.

“Did you draw all of these?” Bucky asked and looked at Steve who stood in front of a shelf full of big skinny envelopes and seemed to search for something.

“Sure did” Steve shortly answered and kept skimming across the backsides of the envelopes. What were those? And what the hell was Steve looking for?

“Is that your family?” Bucky continued to ask and pointed to one of the drawings that showed the woman and the small girl together.

Steve turned his head and that goddamn sadness returned to his eyes when he laid his eyes down on the drawing that Bucky was pointing at. “Yeah, that’s them” he said and gave Bucky a small smile. “Sam has told me countless times to take them down, but I just can’t seem to let it go completely.”

“That’s understandable” Bucky said and kept eyeing the drawings.

“You really think so?” Steve asked.

“Yeah, why wouldn’t I, I mean they were your wife and daughter. You don’t just shake that off. Not even after a few years.”

“You sound like you know what you’re talking about” Steve said and huffed a small laugh, while he kept skimming through those ominous envelopes.

“I really don’t” Bucky said and chuckled sadly “The only family I ever had were my parents” He paused for a second “And well, you all, I guess. Now, what was that thing that you needed to show me so badly?”

He felt uncomfortable talking about his painfully love-less past life, so he changed the topic.

Steve seemed to have finally found the envelope he had been looking for and pulled it out of the shelf, causing a few others to topple over.

“This” he said and held up the envelope, which had a quadratic form and a picture of a man, staring intensely into the camera on the front. The man didn’t look a lot older than Bucky and Steve but the picture looked old. No one looked like this anymore these days.

“What’s that?” Bucky asked, confused as to what was supposed to be so special about this picture.

“A vinyl” Steve said and grinned again. Bucky still didn’t know what the fuck he was being shown, but he let Steve do his thing. He’d figure out eventually, hopefully. Steve tipped the envelope over and a round disc rolled out. Like a DVD, which he had seen in their local history museum when he had been twelve years old, but much bigger. Steve walked over to a very ominous looking machine with it, a very, very old machine that was, and placed it on there. He got a little plastic arm with a tiny needle on it from a small holding and placed it on the disc, which was seemingly being spun by the machine. Steve walked over to Bucky and placed his hands on his hips from behind, placing his head on Bucky’s shoulder. “I gather you’ve never listened to music before” Steve said into his ear, sending shivers down Bucky’s spine.

“What’s mu…?” Bucky began to ask, but he didn’t get to finish, cause he was being interrupted. A series of sounds began spilling out of speakers next to the machine that was playing the vinyl, sounds in a form in which Bucky had never heard them. Conjoined sounds, connected with each other, not stagnant, like speech, for example. The sounds felt nice, they were so different than what Bucky was used to. They felt so old, so nostalgic. It was like a potion or a poison in Bucky’s veins that was able to spark emotions. Then a voice was added to the sound. Bucky’s mom had sung around the house sometimes, but it had always been faint, not very beautiful. This was different. A man with a kind of raspy voice was singing, melodies and words of a time completely unknown to Bucky. He turned around to face Steve, who looked like he had been waiting to put that exact expression onto Bucky’s face. With the new sounds, music, as Steve had called it, Steve looked even more beautiful and Bucky felt like he loved him a little bit more.

“What is that?” Bucky asked in awe, not actually wanting to speak, not to disrupt the music, but he had to ask.

“Bruce Springsteen” Steve chuckled. Bucky had known someone in school who had been called Springsteen, but he didn’t recall a face.

“It’s old isn’t it?” Bucky asked. He didn’t understand much about technology, but he knew that this had to be quite old.

“About 150 years” Steve said, went to the door to lock it, before walking back to Bucky and grabbing his waist. He started to slowly sway back and forth and took Bucky with him, who was rather stumbling back and forth since he had no idea what Steve was trying to do.

“What are you doing?” Bucky chuckled, not to sound like he was complaining , cause the feeling of Steve’s firm grip on his waist was sure one that he welcomed and the steps they were taking were becoming more smooth and began to sync with the music that kept spilling out of the speakers, still overworking Bucky’s brain in the best way possible. He felt like all his life one piece in the puzzle of his soul had been missing and now this was finally it.

“It’s called dancing, dumbass” Steve said and huffed a laugh at him. “Here put your arm on my shoulder. There you go. Now one step to the left, one to the right, just like that. See, you’ve got it.”

Bucky smiled, it really felt nice, this dancing thing, intimate.

“Why did people do this?” Bucky asked. He wondered, sure, music and the dancing was nice, but what was the use of it?

“For fun” Steve said “Not everything has to have a purpose. Sometimes you just do things because they feel good and you have fun doing them.”

The concept seemed strange to Bucky, but it sounded good. Just doing something because it was fun. Because it felt good. Just like the sex he and Steve had had, that was one of those things as well. Or kissing him. Bucky suddenly felt an unbearable wave of want rushing over him and so he pulled Steve’s face into his and put their lips together all the while still swaying in sync with the music, which had stopped for a few seconds and had now changed a bit. A different melody, a different mood. Steve sighed contently into Bucky’s mouth and closed his arms around Bucky’s waist pulling him closer. Bucky still had some slightly painful bruises on his back but he decided not to give that any thought right now. He just wanted to feel Steve and nothing else. Steve’s hands were under his shirt caressing Bucky’s back and the burn scars that were on it now. It stung, but Bucky managed to not make a sound. He broke the kiss for a moment because there was one more thing that he asked himself.

“Where’d you get all this?” he asked.

Steve smirked while he grinded his slowly growing erection against Bucky’s

“Stole it” he said, a little bit out of breath “If taking something from an abandoned history museum can be seen as stealing. They had a remarkable collection of very well preserved vinyls and I just couldn’t let those rot. Why are you asking me random questions when I’m all riled up like this?”

Bucky shrugged his shoulders and grinned back. “Just wondering” he said before smashing his lips against Steve’s again. Steve was the one to make a move and walk them over to his bed, carefully laying Bucky down on the sheets. He got rid of both their shirts in the blink of an eye. He also had a few burn marks on his upper body, but nothing too serious, luckily. He started kissing his way down Bucky’s neck, sending a small electric shock through Bucky’s veins whenever his lips touched Bucky’s skin.

Bucky softly moaned as Steve pressed his groin on Bucky’s and made Bucky realize how hard they both were. “Fuck…” he breathed out which made Steve’s dirty smile even wider. The music in the back only added to the athmosphere. Bucky felt completely safe, more safe even than in his own room.

“Do you want to do this?” Steve asked, aware that Bucky wasn’t fully back at his best health.

“As far as I know, the fire didn’t burn my asshole” Bucky said, panting. Steve looked at him, confusion in his eyes. Bucky chuckled  “That means yes, you moron” he said.

Steve smiled and started unbuttoning Bucky’s pants and pulling them down, leaving him clad only in his boxers which he pulled down just as fast, so Bucky’s dick sprung free, already aching for release. Neither he or Steve had the patience to pull their pants down completely so they just left them dangling around their feet.

Steve used saliva to prep Bucky’s hole, they didn’t have anything else, but it was enough. Quicker than Bucky could think, Steve had already pulled his fingers back out and got inside of him. The feeling of Steve’s cock felt even more ecstatic than last time and Bucky arched up his hips at the sensation, gasping and moaning hoarsely.

“You okay?” Steve asked.

“Fuck yeah” Bucky moaned and started pushing his ass down on Steve’s length, desperate for movement. He was impatient. The time they had was limited.

Even though they both didn’t last very long, it was some of the best sex Bucky had ever had. Steve on top of him, moaning while rocking into Bucky, sending waves of pleasure down Bucky’s spine with every thrust, was the most beautiful thing Bucky had ever witnessed. The way Steve buried his face in Bucky’s neck to muffle his cries, when he hit his release, the way he held him as Bucky came, panting Steve’s name, trying to keep as quiet as possible, all those moments. Bucky wished he could live in them forever. He wished he could live forever in the way Steve held him afterwards, while Bruce Springsteen, who was long dead, still sang quietly in the background, about forgotten times. He wished he could’ve lived in those times he was singing about. But he didn’t. They didn’t. And he would have to go back to his room soon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> boutta yeet myself into the void i feel like my writing has gotten SO BAD.  
> ugh anyways please leave kudos and comments xoxo thanks!

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, I hope you liked this first chapter, I'm sorry that it's not that cheerful, I hope you were able to enjoy it anyways. Please notify me if I forgot any content warnings, I hope I didn't. I'll try to update this as regularly as i can. I hope you all have a nice day :)


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